Donella Meadows | Gristhttps://grist.org
A planet that doesn’t burn, a future that doesn’t suckTue, 20 Mar 2018 01:37:57 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/330e84b0272aae748d059cd70e3f8f8d?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngDonella Meadows | Gristhttps://grist.org
The state of the planet is grim. Should we give up hope?https://grist.org/article/out2/
Fri, 20 Apr 2001 20:00:01 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/out2/Note: Donella Meadows died on 20 Feb. 2001. The following is excerpted from her story about writing The Limits to Growth in 1972. Limits was translated into 26 languages and sold more than 9 million copies.

COMPUTER PREDICTS WORLD COLLAPSE

I was one of the team of people at MIT who wrote a book that created a worldwide burst of media foreboding. It began as a small report. Within a few months we were reading headlines like the one above with complete astonishment.

We didn’t think we had written a prediction of doom. We had intended to issue a warning, but also a vision. We saw, with the help of the computer, not one future but many, all possible, some terrible, some terrific.

In the introduction to The Limits to Growth, we listed three main conclusions, one of danger, one of hope, and one of urgency. The press picked up only the first and the third:

If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next 100 years.

It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future.

If the world’s people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.

You wouldn’t think such simple conclusions would stir up much of a fuss, but the fuss was incredible. The storm went on for years. It inspired conferences, studies, books of denial, and books of affirmation and elaboration. Eventually, like all media-generated storms, this one settled back down.

Later, people who remembered Limits began asking me: Is this it? Are we running into the limits to growth? Were you right after all?

The question “Were you right?” bothered me. It is the wrong question. One can only be right or wrong if one has made a prediction. We didn’t do that. We offered a choice, and people heard a pronouncement of doom.

Are we pushing the limits?

Photo: NREL/PIX.

Since we wrote Limits, the human economy has more than doubled its physical presence, from vehicles to electric power plants to garbage. At the same time, there has been great erosion of the planetary resource base. Species, forests, wetlands, soils, and habitats have been lost, buffers and degrees of protection have decreased, options have narrowed.

I have spent the past 20 years immersed in statistics that describe this decline. I’ve watched them unfold. I’ve presented them to classes and to audiences many times and in a calm tone of voice. I haven’t cried over them. I haven’t yelled in outrage.

That’s because of psychic numbing, I’m sure. I haven’t been hit all at once, as I was the first time I saw the birth-rate graph. Watching the numbers slowly get worse is like watching a child grow up — or a better analogy would be watching someone die of a wasting disease.

Exponential growth of population and physical capital, exponential depletion of resources and degradation of the environment are not necessary to the human condition. But collectively we have been behaving as if they were. Growth is still the pattern of the human system. As yet no corrective processes have been strong enough to stop it. But there are signs of such processes. The good news is that some are coming from human ingenuity and restraint. The bad news is that some are coming from environmental breakdown.

There is a bright side.

Photo: NREL/PIX.

I’ve grown impatient with the kind of debate we used to have about whether optimists or the pessimists are right. Neither are right. There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair.

I am not afraid of the challenge of easing the throughput of human society back down within its limits — I think that can be done fairly easily and even with considerable benefit to the human quality of life. I am afraid of what the world might do with the idea that we are beyond the limits. I have already experienced the hostility, denial, and ridicule engendered by the idea that there are limits. I would expect more of the same from the idea that those limits are already exceeded.

Even worse than denial or ridicule would be simpleminded, uncritical, hysterical acceptance. I can see the headlines now:

BEYOND THE LIMITS: COLLAPSE IS COMING

or

BEYOND THE LIMITS: POPULATION, STANDARD OF LIVING MUST BE CUT

Those are the two worst possible conclusions to jump to. The first confuses trend with destiny again, leaps at prediction, denies choice. The second recognizes only the most dramatic, conflictual, and violent of the possible responses to a state of overshoot.

To ease my fear, to set the record straight, to forestall the destructive headlines, let me write my own headlines in even larger type:

OVERSHOOT DOES NOT MEAN COLLAPSE

and

MATERIAL AND ENERGY THROUGHPUT MUST BE CUT, BUT NOT PEOPLE, NOT LIVING STANDARDS, NOT THE DREAM OF A BETTER WORLD

]]>Climate change is threatening Arctic crittershttps://grist.org/article/polar/
Mon, 05 Feb 2001 20:00:01 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/polar/The place to watch for global warming — the sensitive point, the canary in the coal mine — is the Arctic. If the planet as a whole warms by one degree, the poles will warm by about three degrees. Which is just what is happening.

Polar bears are walking on thin ice.

Ice now covers 15 percent less of the Arctic Ocean than it did 20 years ago. In the 1950s that ice averaged 10-feet thick; now it’s less than six-feet thick. At the current rate of melting, in 50 years the northern ocean could be ice-free all summer long.

That, says a January 19 article in Science, would be the end of polar bears. In fact many creatures of the Arctic Ocean are already in trouble.

Until recently no one knew that there were many creatures of the Arctic Ocean. In the 1970s, a Russian biologist named Melnikov discovered 200 species of tiny organisms, algae and zooplankton, hanging around ice floes in immense numbers, forming slime jungles on the bottoms of bergs and plankton clouds in every break of open water. Their carcasses fall to the bottom to nourish clams, which are eaten by walruses. Arctic cod live on algae scraped off the ice. The cod are eaten by seabirds, whales, and seals. The king of the food chain, hunting mainly seals, is the great white bear.

That was the system until the ice started to thin. In 1997 and 1998 Melnikov returned to the Beaufort Sea and found most of the plankton species, many named by him (and for him), were gone. The ice was nearly gone. Creatures dependent on the plankton (like the cod), or on the ice for dens (seals), or for travel (bears) were gone, too.

Many had just moved north, following the ice, but that means moving farther from land, with widening stretches of open water between. Creatures like the black guillemot, a bird that depends on land for shelter and the ice floe for food, can no longer bridge the gap.

The Arctic is changing faster than scientists can document. Inuit hunters report that ivory gulls are disappearing; no one knows why. Mosquitoes are moving north, attacking murres, which will not move from their nests, so they are literally sucked and stung to death. Caribou can no longer count on thick ice to support their island-hopping in search of the lichens that sustain them. One biologist who spots caribou from the air says, “You sometimes see a caribou trail heading across [the ice], then a little wormhole at the end with a bunch of antlers sticking out.”

Hudson’s Bay polar bears are thinner and are producing fewer cubs. With the ice going out earlier, their seal-hunting season is shrinking. Hungry bears retreat to land and ransack garbage dumps. The town of Churchill in Canada has more jail cells for bears than for people. The bears are also weakened by toxic chemicals that drift north from industrial society and accumulate in the Arctic food chain.

Every five years the world’s climatologists assess current knowledge about global warming. Their latest report was just released. It erases any doubt about where this warming is coming from and warns that we ain’t seen nothing yet. If we keep spewing out greenhouse gases according to pattern, we will see three to 10 times more warming over the 21st century than we saw over the 20th.

Some biologists are saying the polar bear is doomed.

A friend of mine, in response to this news, did the only appropriate thing. She burst out weeping. “What am I going to tell my three-year-old?” She sobbed. Any of us still in contact with our hearts and souls should be sobbing with her, especially when we consider that the same toxins that are in the bears are in the three-year-old. And that the three-year-old over her lifetime may witness collapsing ecosystems, north to south, until all creatures are threatened, especially top predators like polar bears and people.

Is there any way to end this column other than in gloom? Can I give my friend, you, myself any honest hope that our world will not fall apart? Does our only possible future consist of watching the disappearance of the polar bear, the whale, the tiger, the elephant, the redwood tree, the coral reef, while fearing for the three-year-old?

Heck, I don’t know. There’s only one thing I do know. If we believe that it’s effectively over, that we are fatally flawed, that the most greedy and short-sighted among us will always be permitted to rule, that we can never constrain our consumption and destruction, that each of us is too small and helpless to do anything, that we should just give up and enjoy our SUVs while they last — well, then yes, it’s over. That’s the one way of believing and behaving that gives us a guaranteed outcome.

Personally, I don’t believe that stuff at all. I don’t see myself or the people around me as fatally flawed. Everyone I know wants polar bears and three-year-olds in our world. We are not helpless and there is nothing wrong with us except the strange belief that we are helpless and there’s something wrong with us. All we need to do, for the bear and ourselves, is to stop letting that belief paralyze our minds, hearts, and souls.

]]>Are we losing touch with good, simple things?https://grist.org/article/meadows-simple/
Wed, 31 Jan 2001 04:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/meadows-simple/Years ago, when I went out to my new chicken house and found the very first freshly laid egg, I stared at it in awe. “How did that hen do that?” I wondered. She takes in grain and bugs and kitchen scraps and turns them into an egg. Shell on the outside, white and yolk on the inside, all proper and perfect. Under the right conditions (or hen) that egg could even become a chick. Just amazing!

I still think every egg is a miracle, though they appear on our farm by the dozen every day. Our leading-edge chemists are miles from being able to convert cracked corn and cabbage leaves into an egg, much less a chick. The biotech biz can’t make grass into wool and lambs either, though my sheep, which were not at all smart, used to do it with great reliability.

All these years the one farm miracle I never got to witness firsthand was the transformation of hay into calves and milk. I never got a cow. I was daunted by their size and by the prospect of never-fail, twice-daily milkings. “The only difference between being in jail and having a cow,” my then-husband used to recite, “is that in jail you don’t have to milk the cow.”

So I stuck with chickens and sheep, until two years ago, when one of my farm-mates drove in one day with a tiny Jersey calf in the back of the truck. We named her Maple. Maple has just had her own first calf, and we are awash in milk.

I shouldn’t have been surprised at how good fresh, sweet, organic milk is. After all, once I tasted fresh organic eggs I never went back to supermarket ones. The same goes for vegetables and fruits out of the garden. But somehow I thought milk was milk was milk. So I have just learned one more time what we give up in taste and quality for the dubious privilege of living far away from the sources of our increasingly industrialized food.

I was also surprised at the quantity. Jerseys are not big producers, and ours is still working up to her peak, but she’s already milking five gallons a day. That’s nothing to a big farm with Holsteins and vacuum lines and bulk tanks. But when you’re operating out of your kitchen, five gallons a day is a river — a river of possibilities. You can do so many great things with milk!

Most of ours goes into cheese. Up to a month ago I had only the vaguest idea how milk becomes cheese, though this age-old art was once practiced in most rural households. Here’s how it works. You heat milk gently in a stainless steel vat and stir in a magical lactobacillus that turns the milk sugar lactose into lactic acid. You monitor the acidity of the mix to follow the bugs’ working. At just the right moment you add rennet, which congeals the curds. Then, depending on what kind of cheese you’re making, you cut, heat, stir, and salt the curds, scoop them into cheesecloth-lined forms, and press them (with bricks or a bucket of water). The next morning you have a wheel of cheese. You soak it in brine, then age it, ideally in a cave with constant temperature and humidity. Lacking a cave, we built a walk-in cooler.

We just tasted our first cheese, now 45 days old. It’s bland, because it’s only halfway through its minimal aging period. But it’s nutty, elastic, melty, good cheese. In my totally biased opinion, it’s on its way to glory. As with that first egg, I’m in awe.

I am not good at delayed gratification, so I take some milk to experiment with products that can be eaten immediately. So far my favorite trick is this: I start with two gallons of milk and scoop off the top layer of wonderful, thick cream. The cream goes into a hand-cranked churn. After 20 minutes of lackadaisical cranking (I read a book while I do it), the paddles hang up on a half pound of golden butter. I pour off three cups of surrounding liquid, which, kids, is called buttermilk. Great for biscuits or pancakes.

Taking off the cream leaves a gallon and a half of skim milk. That I warm to 90 degrees and stir in a little commercial buttermilk (which contains live lactobacillus). After sitting overnight, it separates into white jelly-like curds and watery yellow whey. (Along came a spider and sat down beside her … now I know where those nursery rhymes come from.) I cut the curds into pieces, warm them a little, scoop them out, add a bit of salt, and voila! A quart and a half of low-fat cottage cheese! I feel very clever, though it was the bacillus and the cow and the housemate who milked the cow who did the real work.

One more transformation could turn the whey into ricotta. But we make that with the whey from the other cheesemaking, so our refrigerator is well stocked. (Lasagna, blintzes, cheesecake!) I take the whey out to the chickens, who slurp it up contentedly. It’s full of nutrients that flow into the eggs. The composted chicken and cow manure go to the garden to flow into the vegetables.

Simple miracles. Satisfying work, like baking bread or building a shelf. Fresh, delicious food. Nutrient cycles closed right at hand. Health for land and people. Sometimes I wonder, with all our supposed progress, what we’re rushing toward and what we’re leaving behind.

]]>Deregulation in California didn't help consumers, or the environmenthttps://grist.org/article/electric/
Mon, 22 Jan 2001 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/electric/As blackouts roll through California, the New Hampshire Supreme Court cleared the way for electrical restructuring, while a Vermont utility assured legislators that what is happening out West can’t happen here.

Why not?

The powers that don’t have to be.

As I hear people try to explain California’s electricity problem, I wonder whether anyone really understands the market system. We discuss it endlessly, we have whole university departments to study it, we nearly worship it. But when we say things like “competition will bring down rates,” I wonder if we know what we are talking about.

I’m not sure I can explain California either. (Ever. About anything.) But there are some things I can make strong guesses about, even from a distance.

First, electricity restructuring is not being driven by the goal of reducing residential rates. The drivers are technology and industry. New ways of making electricity, such as combined-cycle natural gas generators, and soon fuel cells, allow industrial users to produce their own power at lower cost and with less pollution. One by one they are slipping off the grid, leaving the utilities, with their huge, outmoded, unpaid-for power plants, in a panic.

To save themselves, the power companies meet in back rooms with politicians. They must accomplish three things. First, they must allow big customers to lock in low rates, so they will stay on the grid. Second, they must pay off the debt for their dinosaur plants. Third, they must sell the deal to the public by promising lower rates.

The only way to pull off this miracle is with a public bail-out, called “stranded costs” in the back rooms. Stranded cost payments mean that your electric bill will actually be higher, but a chunk of it will be hidden in your tax bill. This maneuver has nothing to do with a free market. It is perverse socialism. Prop up a dying industry by forcing the people to pay for bad investments. Order utilities to cut rates for awhile to lull taxpayers. Then let the people shop for power in competition with the big guys. That’s where the market will come in, but markets aren’t kind to little players competing against big ones.

Restructuring has already squeezed out the best supply strategy, namely efficiency. In almost any application, from lighting to water pumps to electric motors, it is cheaper and far better for the environment to install devices that deliver the same service with less power.

However, the market competes for lowest up-front price, not lowest price over the lifetime of a product. How many of us will buy a 10-buck compact fluorescent light bulb instead of a regular one for $1.50? Even if we believe that over 10 years the more expensive bulb will save money?

In the old electric system, it cost utilities less to subsidize our more efficient bulbs than to build another dinosaur power plant. In the deregulated system, they have only one incentive: to sell us as much power as possible at the lowest apparent price. So much for efficiency.

California at the moment is experiencing another market flaw. Prices oscillate. The magic point where supply meets demand is not written in the sky. It is found only by producing too much, finding that the excess isn’t selling, so cutting price and production until you’ve cut a little too far, then correcting upward again. This cycle is especially vicious for electricity, because the machines that produce (generators) and consume (motors, appliances, heating and air conditioning systems) tend to be expensive, long-lived, and slow to build. Therefore over- and under-corrections can go on for months or years. One of the difficult blessings of the old regulated system was that it forced onto utilities a bias toward overcapacity that damped market cycles.

California’s immediate problems result, I think, from all the above factors plus bad luck. Temporarily capped residential rates, giving consumers no incentive to conserve, spurred demand not so much in California as in surrounding states on the grid. A few major power plants happened to shut down. The feds chose that vulnerable moment to remove caps on the wholesale rate that utilities can charge each other. Suddenly California utilities had to buy power at uncontrolled rates while selling at controlled ones. Consumers with their fixed rates saw no reason to cut back. Opportunities opened for price gouging. Aluminum plants in Washington state are making a bundle by shutting down and selling power (which they buy at locked-in low rates) to California. Because money cannot instantly transform itself into working power plants, there are still rolling blackouts.

Could it happen in the East? Not likely, I think, but not impossible. Other surprising things could happen too.

How do we help this vital system make the transition to a decentralized future, with power supplied by gas, sun, wind, and hydrogen instead of coal, oil, and nuclear fission? No one fully knows. But some general rules are obvious. Plan far ahead, and plan for the welfare of the whole system, not just the utilities or the big consumers. Remember that demand reductions are just as effective as supply increases, and cheaper and cleaner. Don’t set up the poor to bid against the rich. Don’t try to control prices in only one part of the system. Don’t hide real costs. Throw away comfortable myths about how the market will do everything for us and start thinking.

Above all don’t allow anything as critical as electricity (or health care or airline safety or food or pharmaceutical safety) to be restructured by power brokers in back rooms.

]]>Let's hope campaign finance reform saves the dayhttps://grist.org/article/bushed/
Tue, 16 Jan 2001 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/bushed/I will never believe he won. I’ll always think he got a minority of both the popular and the electoral vote. To me he’ll always be President-Under-False-Pretense.

The president-elect prepares to step up to the plate.

Well, but you know, the Rs would feel the same way if a few hundred Florida votes had tipped the other way. Only worse. If the tables were turned, the Rs would be whipping up their talk radio attack dogs, organizing more threatening mobs, turning over rocks looking for grounds for the next impeachment. At least for the next four years we will be relieved of that kind of bitterness. Whatever their faults, the Ds lose more politely than the Rs do.

But a president who knows and cares so little! Who spent more hours working out and playing video games than being governor of Texas! Who has no idea what it’s like to lead a non-privileged life! Who never accomplished anything without the help of his dad and his dad’s rich friends!

Great country, isn’t it? Anyone with the right dad or friends can become president. Anyway, he’s not running the country alone. Colin Powell will probably be a good secretary of state.

But that James Watt clone as secretary of Interior! A property rights activist in charge of the national lands! Oil and mining companies come right on in, drill anywhere, dump your toxic mine tailings. Property rights means you have all the private rights you want to public property. So long wilderness, hello clearcuts, overgrazing, and snowmobiles all over the national parks!

Oh, come on, calm down. We survived James Watt. We’ll survive this. Think how it will invigorate the enviro groups.

But W. is acting like he has some kind of a mandate, for Pete’s sake! He claims the nation actually asked for that tax cut that will favor the rich and bring back the deficits! And for turning Social Security over to the stock market casino! And for the end of the inheritance tax! If he’d been forthright about his platform of helping the rich get richer, this would not have been a close election and he would not be able to pretend he won.

Well, but 50 million people did vote for him. Right, I know, 50 million voted for Gore, too. So hey, be thankful for checks and balances. W. will never get everything he asks for. He may not get anything he asks for.

But the Supremes, the Supremes! They hijacked the election on the most flimsy and inconsistent legal grounds. Now the Rs are in a position to stuff the court with more crooked politicos like that. So long civil rights, farewell to legal abortion, good-bye to what remains of our already shredded ideal of equal justice under the law! Don’t be so melodramatic. The Ds occupy half the Senate. They can block any court nomination they want to.

They won’t. They’re so darn polite.

They’re not brain dead. They’re the loyal opposition. That’s how democracy works. If you’re in the minority, you don’t roll over, you go on making your case as persuasively as you can, under the assumption that if it’s a good case, eventually it will prevail.

I no longer believe that assumption. The majority of people are not in favor of ripping off the national lands, weakening control on tobacco or guns or pollution, or building up the rights of corporations at the expense of the rights of citizens. W. never admitted he would do those things. Not only did he win on false pretenses, he ran on false pretenses.

But everyone who was paying attention knew what the Rs’ real agenda is. Not enough people pay attention. And they’re brainwashed by the sappy campaign ads and the jiggered debates and the phony conventions, all of which serve to hide real agendas.

Hey, I thought you voted for Nader. So what are you complaining about? This outcome was your fault. I could get furious with you about that.

Why get furious at a person who votes for the policies she deeply believes in — single-payer health insurance, strong environmental protection, an end to corporate welfare, and no more over-expensive useless weapons, and controls on global corporatization — policies you believe in too — and that, polls show, most Americans believe in, only they never heard anyone defend them publicly, because neither of the big-party candidates dared.

Okay, okay, okay, enough, I’ve heard that rant.

But the point of it — okay here’s the point — the point is, this political system sucks. The issues and concerns of the people are squeezed out by the issues and concerns of the centralized money-makers. The country runs on money-making at the expense of all other purposes and values.

So, Republican John McCain, with the moderate Rs and virtually all the Ds, is ready to ram campaign reform down W’s throat and at least get the soft money corruption out of politics.

Now there’s an issue where I can whip up some enthusiasm for national unity!

]]>An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of curehttps://grist.org/article/down/
Tue, 09 Jan 2001 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/down/What do you do when you want to move fast but the way ahead is dark, possibly dangerous, and almost entirely unknown? Accelerate? Proceed with moderation? Slow way down? Stop?

Don’t spray it.

That question underlies most environmental regulations. We are not sure what pesticides are doing to soils, waters, other creatures, or ourselves. We have only a vague idea what our rising greenhouse gas output will do to the climate. We’re in the dark about the consequences of genetic engineering. So should we go ahead? How fast?

U.S. policy, and that of most other countries, has ranged from acceleration to moderation. Often the cost has been revealed only decades later, in the form of poisoned wells, sickened rivers, unhealthy air, dying wildlife, deformed babies. Now some governments are saying it makes more sense to slow down or stop.

The go-slow policy is hotly discussed in Europe and in the United Nations, but it is rarely mentioned in the U.S. news. It is called the “precautionary principle.” The basic idea is familiar to everyone. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Look before you leap. If you can’t afford to lose, don’t gamble.

Or as a scientific gathering in 1998 put it: “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”

Or as Christine Todd Whitman put it, two months before George W. Bush appointed her to head the Environmental Protection Agency: “We must acknowledge that uncertainty is inherent in managing natural resources, recognize it is usually easier to prevent environmental damage than to repair it later, and shift the burden of proof away from those advocating protection toward those proposing an action that may be harmful.”

If she meant that, she may be a historic EPA director.

U.S. environmental policy is based not on the precautionary principle, but on “risk management.” That means balancing risks against benefits. If the benefits seem to outweigh the risks, full steam ahead. If a pesticide will give cancer to only one person in a million, but make a corporation a hundred million bucks, go for it.

There are two big problems with risk/benefit policy. The first is that those who bear the risk are rarely the ones who get the benefits. The second problem is that the benefits are usually much better known than the risks. It is astonishing how much we don’t know about what we are doing.

See, for example, an article by 17 scientists from six countries in a recent Science magazine that summarizes the literature on climate change. It cites facts like this: In the past 100 years human fossil fuel burning has raised the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide higher than it has been for the previous 420,000 years — and we’re still accelerating.

The article repeats over and over that we do not know what that means for the planet. “As we drift further away from the domain that characterized the preindustrial Earth system, we severely test the limits of our understanding of how the Earth system will respond,” say the authors. And “humans have affected virtually every major biogeochemical cycle, but the effects of these impacts on the interactions between these elemental cycles are poorly understood.”

So, push the accelerator pedal to the floor?

Another Science article in December surveys what we know about the effects of genetically engineered organisms (GEOs). This article is another ode to uncertainty. “Neither the risks nor the benefits of GEOs are certain or universal.” “Our ability to accurately predict ecological consequences, especially long-term higher-order interactions, increases the uncertainty associated with risk assessment.” “Additional or unidentified benefits and risks may exist that published data do not yet address.”

Should we turn hundreds of GEOs out of our labs and plant them on millions of acres of land?

Yet another recent Science article summarizes the findings of an expert panel on endocrine disrupters — hormone-mimicking chemicals, including many pesticides and plasticizers. The panel concluded that incredibly tiny concentrations of these chemicals — concentrations virtually all of us are exposed to — can cause development problems in rat and mouse embryos. The findings are especially disturbing, because they contradict the basic assumption underlying all toxics policy: that a low enough dose of any poison is essentially harmless.

But the studies were done on lab animals. “How these results may relate to disease late in life in animals, let alone humans, is uncertain,” says the article.

Shall we go on cranking out the chemicals?

Yes, say those who make money from them. No, says the precautionary principle. Plastics, pesticides, fossil fuels, gene-modified crops may make someone money and may save us all time or increase our convenience. But there are ways to proceed, probably more slowly, without them or with much less of them. It’s not worth risking human health or the planetary functions that sustain us, just to keep going fast.

]]>Sea lions escape with protections for nowhttps://grist.org/article/lion/
Thu, 04 Jan 2001 20:00:01 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/lion/The drama of the presidential election, they say, has awakened the interest of the public, and especially of young people, in the democratic process.

So welcome, young people, to the entertainment that never ends. Once the question “who won?” is settled, other questions begin. What are the people who won up to? For whose benefit? At whose expense?

Mufasa, Steller sea lion.

Photo: NOAA

Take, for example, the epic battle between Bill Clinton and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee. (The standard media title is “the POWERFUL head of the Appropriations Committee.” This guy controls the bills authorizing all the money the government spends.) Clinton and Stevens have been wrestling for months over those government funding bills. Central to the fight has been the fate of an animal called the Steller sea lion.

The sea lion, which can reach the size of a small car, lounges along the chilly coasts of the Bering Sea, the Aleutian Islands, and the Gulf of Alaska in Sen. Stevens’s home state. Its population is crashing, down from 140,000 in 1960 to 16,000 now. In 1990, environmentalists sued to make the government declare the Steller endangered. (Why, young people may ask, do citizens need to sue the government to make it enforce an environmental law? Well, that has to do with campaign funding, as you’ll see in a minute here.)

Sen. Ted Stevens and the Alaska fishing fleet owners, who provide him with campaign funds, say they have no idea why the Steller sea lion is in trouble. But this is actually a no-brainer. The sea lion lives on fish. Its population started plummeting precisely when and where huge bottom-trawlers started to scoop up cod and pollock and mackerel in million-ton quantities. The main catch, the pollock, is shipped to Japan, where it is ground into fish paste or made into fake crab meat. The fake crab meat is handy, because the bottom trawlers also destroy crabs.

The cold waters off Alaska are full of nutrients and therefore full of fish and therefore full of creatures that eat fish. Here’s what happens when people take virtually all the fish away. The sea lions and seals and sea birds starve. The orcas — sleek black and white killer whales — can no longer live on their favorite snack of fat seal. So orcas start eating sea otters, those cute aquatic acrobats that float on their backs and play games in the water. The sea otters disappear. That causes an explosion of sea urchins, which is what sea otters eat, when they’re around, which they aren’t any more. The bloated sea urchin population munches away the great kelp, the many-foot-long seaweed that forms underwater forests where hundreds of other species live.

In short, the whole ecosystem falls apart. The fishery is also on the verge of falling apart. There are so few pollock left that the ships are having trouble filling their government-determined quotas — quotas that have been raised steadily over the past 10 years, despite the endangered state of the sea lion and despite biologists’ warnings that the fishery itself is near depletion.

Under court order, government biologists finally drew up a plan to cut back the allowed pollock catch by about 20 percent, so that sea lions, seals, birds, orcas, and otters might live (and fishermen too, in the long run). So Ted Stevens, Powerful Head of the Appropriations Committee, routinely sticks onto every spending bill a little “rider” saying that the Endangered Species Act shall not apply to the Steller sea lion. Let it go extinct. Sea lions don’t give campaign contributions, and their friends the enviros don’t give nearly as much as the fishing industry does.

The Republican-led Congress, in its wisdom, approves the bill with the rider and sends it to the president. Take that, Bill Clinton! Sign, or the government will run out of money! Enviro groups pelt the White House with letters, faxes, and emails pleading “don’t sign, don’t sign!” Clinton sends the bill back to Stevens unsigned and tells him to take the rider away.

Stevens takes the rider off, attaches it to the next spending bill, and so it went all fall. Last month, they got to the last bill. High noon. Sea lion or fishery. Government funding or Endangered Species Act. Stevens vs. Clinton, eye to eye, do or die.

Every bit as exciting as hanging chads!

Clinton, knowing it was his last chance, didn’t blink. Stevens, knowing he’s about to have a much more amenable president, settled for a $50 million bribe (to go to sea lion research and Alaskan fishing communities). The rider was removed. The government will have operating funds and will enforce the Endangered Species Act. For a year, anyway.

What do you think will happen next year?

Young people, this is just one small tale from the multi-channel soap opera of politics. It’s better than “The West Wing,” and it runs every day, with never a rerun. Better yet, you get to play with the plot; you get to write letters and faxes and emails, to give campaign contributions if you can afford it, and to decide — if you vote and if they count the votes — who shall win next time, what they shall be up to, for whose benefit, at whose expense.

]]>Sweden takes big steps to ban chemicalshttps://grist.org/article/these/
Fri, 15 Dec 2000 20:00:01 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/these/However environmentally permissive a Republican-controlled U.S. may be, other parts of the world are pioneering attitudes, technologies, and laws that could carry us safely through the 21st century. As this week’s happy example, I offer the new global agreement on POPs, plus Sweden’s even better policy on the same topic.

All-natural breast milk — now fortified with POPs!

Photo: Art Wolfe, Inc.

POPs is the hot new acronym for persistent organic pollutants. These chemicals are immediately toxic or cause cancer or reproductive difficulties or birth defects (or all of the above) and are almost immortal in the environment. They are human-made, new to the planet. Few life forms know how to break them down. Furthermore most POPs contain strong chlorine-carbon bonds that tend to make them stable even in cold, heat, and sunlight. That stability renders them handy for industry and real hard to clean out of ecosystems.

The first global agreement on POPs was successfully negotiated earlier this month in Johannesburg. After five years of preparation and seven days of word-by-word wrangling, delegates from 122 nations agreed on a document that will, when ratified, impose worldwide bans or controls on a “dirty dozen” POPs. They include nine pesticides (aldrin, chlordane, DDT, dieldrin, endrin, heptachor, hexachlorobenzene, mirex and toxaphene), plus three chemical families called PCBs, dioxins, and furans.

Most of these chemicals are already banned in industrial nations. Some of those nations, including the U.S., still make them and export them to developing countries. Doing so is stupid, because POPs come back to haunt us. They are global travelers, drifting through air and water, found as readily in the Arctic or on imported coffee as in Hudson River bottom mud. The average American’s body is likely to contain at least 500 human-made chemicals, with the highest amounts being DDE (a breakdown product of DDT) and PCBs — though their manufacture has been banned in the U.S. for decades.

POPs tend to be more soluble in fat than in water, so once they are eaten, say by a minnow snapping up a POP-contaminated bit of plankton, they are stored in fat. The minnow carries nearly all the POPs it has ever encountered. A larger fish accumulates the POPs from all the minnows it eats. And so on. Whatever eats the biggest fish — an eagle or polar bear or seal or person — can get a POP dose hundreds of thousands of times more concentrated than the water in which that fish swam.

So eagles around the Great Lakes still have trouble reproducing. North Sea seals with high body loads of PCBs have compromised immune systems that can’t fight off common infections. Female polar bears are found with male reproductive organs that render them sterile. Breast milk in India and Zimbabwe gives babies on average six times the acceptable daily intake of DDE. Around the world women who have nursed are less likely to develop breast cancer; one possible reason is that they have downloaded part of their body load of POPs to their infants.

Clearly time to do something. Decades past time, actually. Our world is full of POPs, many more than the dirty dozen covered by the new global agreement. More than 50,000 synthetic organic chemicals are in regular use, most of which have never been properly tested for their health impacts, environmental lifetimes, and tendencies to bioaccumulate. Roughly a thousand new chemicals enter industrial production every year. The barn door has been open far too long. Closing it on 12 horses out of thousands is a start, but only a small one.

Sweden is taking the next step. Its prime minister is about to submit to a willing parliament a law banning from commerce any substance (organic or inorganic — including the lead in Sweden’s famed leaded crystal) that is persistent and bioaccumulates. Industry will be given five years to test, at its own expense, the 2,500 chemicals it uses in quantities over 1000 tons per year. (Testing for health effects, which is time-consuming, expensive, and often inconclusive, is not required — only testing for persistence and bioaccumulation, which in combination is sufficient to generate a ban.) By 2010, all industrial chemicals must be tested.

For any new chemical the burden of proof in Sweden will be shifted to industry to show that it’s safe, rather than to the public to prove, often the hard way, that it’s harmful. While the jury is out, the chemical cannot be used. That is the reverse of the policy in the U.S. (and other countries), where a chemical is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

The amazing part of this story is the grown-up behavior of Swedish companies. The policy was shaped by a panel of experts from government, academia, and industry led by the Bayer chemical company. Swedish industry already has pooled resources for the necessary testing. Orrefors Kosta Boda, the glass company that can see coming the end of the legal use of lead, is calmly developing ways to make scintillating glass with barium instead.

Meanwhile, at Johannesburg Clinton-Gore negotiators opposed expanding the POPs list beyond the dirty dozen. Everyone knew that a Republican-dominated Congress would never ratify the treaty anyway. The Bush-Cheney administration is expected to listen only to the short-sighted side of the chemical industry.

]]>Will election 2000 lead to reform or not?https://grist.org/article/history/
Mon, 11 Dec 2000 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/history/The crowds demonstrating outside Florida courtrooms and counting rooms have been reminding me of the historical opera “Boris Godounov.” It opens with peasants milling about, waiting to find out who will be their next czar. Every now and then a handler comes out and whips them up to yell for Boris, who is not the rightful successor. The music reinforces the ominous tone of corruption.

Noisy crowds should not influence vote counts or court decisions. The constantly repeated query “are Americans getting tired of this yet?” is ominous, when the real question is “for whom did Americans really vote?” There is no noble reason to suppress, delay, or disqualify the careful recounting of disputed votes.

Generations from now, when present passions are spent, when George W. Bush is only a historic name like Boris Godounov, when the facts are viewed in the cool light of history, the U.S. 2000 election will be presented as a drama of corruption, small and large. Small partisan shenanigans in Florida. Large cracks in the political process that elevated two candidates so evenly unlikable that small-scale corruption could swing the outcome.

When the story is told fairly, it will show both sides playing tricks to tilt the vote. But scholars will note that Florida was in the hands of the Republican brother of one of the candidates. The legislature and political appointees were predominantly Republican. The Republican party was full of far-right, take-no-prisoners power brokers, furious that eight years of vicious attempts to depose a Democratic president had failed.

The history books will consider it important that:

Exiting voters gave pollsters the impression that they had tilted slightly but definitively toward Gore. The networks were mocked for forecasting wrong from those polls, but they may have read voter intent right.

Tens of thousands of ballots in Democratic counties were discarded because of mechanical flaws.

The only county that registered thousands of votes for anti-Semite Pat Buchanan has a large Jewish population. That result makes no sense until you see how that county’s confusing ballot must have misrecorded votes meant for Gore.

Republican partisans spent days behind the scenes in at least two county offices, tampering with absentee ballots.

With a vanishing narrow lead, Republicans put enormous effort into blocking or discrediting all recounts.

This is ugly stuff, but small, probably only shifting a few thousand votes, important only because by the quirks of the electoral system it had the power to decide the election.

The large issue is what the history books will say happened next. They could say that Americans rose up in outrage over this erosion of their democratic rights. The people insisted on trustworthy vote-counting mechanisms in all states and counties. They made sure that ballot handling, before and after elections, was bipartisan and balanced. They reaffirmed and enforced their voting rights act. They promptly voted the power brokers out of office.

Then they asked why they had been served up such puny candidates. How did indolent, ignorant Bush prevail over tough, moral, experienced McCain? How did the mechanical showoff Gore beat out the genuine, dedicated Bradley? The problems were clear: money and misleading publicity. Interdependent problems, both fixable. The people insisted on getting elections financed from their taxes (so candidates not only had an even playing field but were beholden only to them) and air time evenly available instead of buyable. In reclaiming their democracy, the American people inspired others all over the world to do the same.

Or the story might go another direction. Dispirited by mendacious candidates and disrespect for their votes, the people sank into a TV-fed trance. Declaring the system stupid and crooked, they ignored it, leaving the dark-minded manipulators of the sock-puppet president to their own devices. The sock-puppet permitted them to gut Social Security, weaken education, enrich the rich, despoil natural resources, and flood the nation with feel-good public relations (which in other venues is called propaganda).

Corporations had free speech but not people. Court appointees undermined civil rights. The gap between the rich and the poor accelerated. The poor were forgotten, resentful, rebellious. The once-proud nation sank of its own corrupt weight. Finally, all pretense of democracy gone, the power brokers turned on each other.

In Russia, Boris Godounov came to power after many machinations, including the mysterious murder of the rightful heir. He died seven years later. His son was murdered by a pretender, who reigned for a year before he was himself murdered by one of the handlers who had whipped up that crowd that yelled for Boris. That guy lasted four years before he was thrown out by yet another putsch.

That’s what history looks like, when successions are determined by crowd clamor, background manipulation, complete disrespect for the people, and the unrestrained desire for power. That’s what democracy was designed to avoid.

]]>Americans dragged their heels at The Hague, but others are acting to stop climate changehttps://grist.org/article/dont1/
Mon, 04 Dec 2000 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/dont1/The most earth-shaking event of the past two weeks had to do with leadership, or lack thereof, but it did not unfold in Florida. It happened in the Netherlands. The stunning lack of leadership came from the Clinton-Gore administration.

The meeting in The Hague was the sixth attempt since the Kyoto conference of 1997 to forge an international agreement that could actually do something about climate change. At Kyoto the industrial countries made solemn promises to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Europe promised to cut back 8 percent from its 1990 level, Japan by 6 percent, the U.S. by 7 percent.

These cutbacks seem laughable in the face of the climatic facts. Scientists worldwide agree that the reduction needed to stabilize the climate is actually more like 80 percent. The latest scientific assessment has almost doubled the predicted rate of warming if no changes are made. The Arctic ice pack has thinned by 40 percent. The Inuit people are seeing thunderstorms for the first time in legend or memory. Glaciers are almost gone from Glacier National Park. However, since Kyoto, the world’s nations have not even been able to agree on a definition of “cut back.”

You would think “cut back” would mean, you know, cut back, burn less fossil fuel. Everyone except the far right wing of the Republican Party realizes that oil, gas, and coal burning are the main activities that have sent the climate into bigger floods, droughts, hurricanes, and El Ninos.

But the present administration, which as we know has trouble defining what “is” is, wants to define “cut back” in a way that will irritate no oil, coal, gas, electric, or automobile company, and no driver of a gas-guzzling vehicle. Therefore it wants to cut back using forests and farms.

There is some sense to this proposal. Trees and soils can absorb carbon dioxide released by fossil fuel burning. It would be great to subsidize responsible farmers and forest managers. The possibility has even opened the minds of some Western Republican senators to the whole climate issue.

But calculating how much carbon is absorbed by which forests and farms is a tricky task, especially when politicians do it. Not only should you give credit for tree growth or the buildup of soil humus, you should issue demerits for tree cutting or the destruction of humus. There is a terrible political temptation to ignore the demerits, to fudge the numbers, to pretend you’ve helped out the atmosphere when you’ve actually done no such thing.

You may be able to fool the voters that way, but not the atmosphere. Nor the scientists who know how to do proper carbon accounts. Nor, it turns out, the European nations, most of which take climate change very seriously. After days of wrangling, they finally refused to let the U.S. get away with cheating.

So everyone went home mad (at us) and the climate continues to deteriorate. After eight years with Al Gore in as much power as he may ever be, our country is far from a global leader on this issue. We are the obstructionist, the outlaw, the Saddam Hussein. And George W. cares as much about climate change as you would expect from a Texas oilman.

So here’s the good news. A knowledgeable and courageous U.S. president could help enormously in leading the world’s nations toward saving the climate, but an ignorant or servile president can’t stop committed nations, companies, or people from doing it anyway.

Whatever the United States does, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany have detailed plans to cut their greenhouse emissions by 20 to 50 percent — and in the process pioneer and patent the new energy technologies that will inevitably replace coal and oil.

Seven corporations, who together emit enough greenhouse gases to qualify as the world’s 12th largest emitting nation, have pledged cutbacks of 15 percent — twice the Kyoto targets. They even include two forward-looking oil companies, Royal Dutch/Shell and British Petroleum (whose new motto is “Beyond Petroleum.”) Polaroid is working toward cuts of 25 percent, DuPont 65 percent. Real cuts, not offset by trees.

Honda’s and Toyota’s new cars that get 50-70 miles per gallon are selling faster than expected. Daimler-Benz is close to marketing fuel-cell cars that run on hydrogen (and emit only water). In a few years, Ford is planning to market a fuel-cell-powered SUV.

And you and I don’t need a president or a global treaty to tell us to use stop wasting energy. We benefit immediately from doing so, with lower bills, less air and water pollution, less dependence on the Middle East, and ultimately, hopefully, a climate that is no longer zinging out of control.

No point in waiting around for leadership, in Florida or The Hague. Leaders only get their power from us, anyway.

]]>Reading tea leaves for the environmenthttps://grist.org/article/back/
Mon, 27 Nov 2000 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/back/Every month I get a kind of Reader’s Digest for people interested in the future. It’s called Future Survey, issued by the World Future Society. Each month it contains about 50 extended summaries of recent publications about the paths — economic, environmental, social — we seem to be following.

The November 2000 issue, for example, starts with a review of a Cato Institute book called It’s Getting Better All the Time. American average life span rose from 47 years in 1900 to 77 in 1998. Median household wealth has doubled since 1965. The fraction of the population living in poverty is falling, as are teen drinking, drug use, and pregnancies. Relax and rejoice. Life is getting ever better.

Immediately following is a speech by Graham Molitor, vice president of the World Future Society, about a future of leisure. Robots will do more of our work; increased life expectancy and fewer child-bearing years will open half our lifetimes to pure fun. Cruise ships, luxury hotels, theme parks, and gambling are already booming.

But the next article by sociologist Stanley Eitzen documents the fragmentation of American social life. Personal bankruptcies are at a record high, hunger and homelessness are rising, 44 million people have no health insurance, American rates of poverty, murder, and imprisonment are the highest in the industrial world.

That may be why, going on to the next review, we are Bowling Alone. The update of this book by Robert Putnam contains “data-drenched chapters” about declining political, civic, and religious participation, less altruism and volunteering, more disputes, lawsuits, commuting, and TV.

And so on, article after article, all written by informed, articulate, sincere experts. Breathless accounts of the digital revolution and the information age and the thrilling world of venture capital alternate with gloomy reports of global climate change, horrible deformities in frogs, impending water scarcity, rising depression and suicide and divorce, plummeting work satisfaction, growing distrust, and loneliness.

If you read any one of these books or articles, you’d be convinced either that we’re making progress or going down the tubes. If you read them all, back to back, you see how different observers select particular data to shade the picture dark or bright. Many of us seem to have some sort of glandular urge to notice exclusively either the bad news or the good. The real world is full of both. We’re not good at reporting on the whole fairly or completely.

The World Bank, among other organizations, is trying to fix that reporting problem, by expanding its capital accounts. Capital, in a financial sense, is an accumulation of dollars in a bank or stock or bond account. It goes down when we spend more than we save and up when we save more than we spend. As a society we are great at keeping money capital accounts.

But other kinds of capital are more important. For example there is physical productive capital — the factories, roads, buildings, machines, vehicles that make up our real economic wealth. (Money capital is just a stand-in for physical capital; it has no value of its own.) We can build up money capital accounts by letting bridges decay and cars age and factories get obsolete. But that, as the Soviet Union found out, is an exercise in self-deception.

Then there’s human capital, the health and skills embodied in the population. Like other forms of capital, as this one goes up, so does the productive potential of the society. Like other capitals, human capital rises with investment (in education, proper diet, clean air and water, health care) and falls with age and poor maintenance. The World Bank and IMF are beginning to admit that their standard technique for enhancing the financial capital of nations systematically cuts investment in human capital — draining one source of wealth to built up another. Lousy accounting.

Social capital is the complex of agreements, habits, laws, and institutions that hold people together in functional societies. The ability to enter and enforce contracts. Efficient and trustworthy government. Strong families. Law and order. The volunteerism and generosity that Robert Putnam says is declining in America.

Finally — or rather first — comes natural capital, the wealth of the earth. Fertile soils, unsullied waters, abundant forests and fish. The cleansing and nourishing cycles of the planet, without which there would be no other kinds of capital. There is no doubt what direction natural capital is going. According to a new report by the World Wildlife Fund, “the natural wealth of the world’s forests, freshwater ecosystems, and oceans and coasts fell by 33 percent between 1970 and 1999.”

What Future Survey reveals, article after article, month after month, is a world fixated on building up money capital, and in most places physical capital, and for a minority of the population human capital, at the expense everywhere of social and natural capital. Those who count money and the welfare of the privileged see good news. Those who count nature and societal health and the welfare of the entire population see bad news.

If there is to be any future for us, we have got to learn to admit all the news and do full accounting.

]]>The endless campaign shows it's time to change the electoral systemhttps://grist.org/article/what1/
Mon, 20 Nov 2000 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/what1/What is it we are learning in the aftermath of this crazy election? How powerful a single vote can be?

Or how worthless a single vote can be, when 19,000 of them can be tossed out in one county? When boxes of ballots get lost? When recounts are demanded or stopped depending on their expected outcome?

Such a plunge, from the sublimity of voting day to the ridiculousness that followed!

No matter how far down the candidates have dragged the campaign, voting day still seems sublime to me. I feel I am participating in a sacred ritual. At the polling place my neighbors are transformed into dignified officials, overseeing a solemn process. The people file by, in work boots or office shoes, each one equal. There’s a sense of awe — 100 million people are having their say. One or another of those tinny candidates is about to be invested with our joint power.

But the day after? Given 100 million pieces of data, mistakes will be made. Given what’s at stake, votes cast in faith will be tampered with. We’ve always known about election “irregularities” in Chicago and East Texas. Now West Palm Beach? Butterfly ballots and dimpled chads?

Much is ridiculous here, but not the long wait for results. Some people are saying that the uncertainty is undermining our democracy, holding the nation in unbearable doubt, distressing the people. But everyone around me is leading a normal life, with the added spice of a drama to talk about. The only folks who seem eaten with anxiety are those hoping to get to ride in Air Force One.

It would be better for the nation if the unsettledness goes on for awhile. Times of irresolution may be uncomfortable, but they are also exciting and important. They foster creativity. We begin to think, first jokingly, then seriously, outside the box. As when some people say, we didn’t much like either of those guys; let’s just keep Bill Clinton till they come up with something better.

Or others say, let’s have a co-presidency. One could go to ceremonies; the other could be the policy wonk. Or each could get two years, or one month on, one month off. Given inevitable counting errors, some kind of power sharing should probably follow any race where the margin between candidates is closer than, say, one percent.

Others want to get rid of the rusty, creaking electoral college. Not only is it an outrage for the person who lost the popular vote to win the election, the principle of “winner-take-all” is an outrage to minority voters. When I lived in a state where I was always in the minority, I found it easy to think, “Heck, why bother?” The only thing that kept me going to the polls was my respect for the process. That was before this election had given all of us much too close a look at the inner workings of the process.

How about — to reward efficient fiscal management — awarding the presidency to the candidate who paid the least for each vote? By that criterion Nader ($2.50 per vote) would win, with Gore second ($2.70), Bush third ($3.70) and Buchanan a distant last ($64.00 per vote).

Better yet, let’s end the corrupting role of money in our campaigns.

There is no reason why 100 million people need to put up with a system that mocks their trust, twists their intentions, or ignores their input. This is our game; we can write the rules. This election has shown clearly that the present rules do not respect the votes of all the people. So let its messy conclusion keep us in uncertainty long enough to make changes.

Nebraska and Maine already split their electoral votes by congressional district, so “winner takes all” at least recognizes different votes in different parts of the state. That rule would have ended the controversy in Florida. Why doesn’t every state adopt it? Or why don’t we dump the electoral college and go to a popular vote?

Why not the instant runoff? When there are more than two candidates, each voter could rank them in order of preference. If no candidate gets more than 50 percent (as was the case in this election), all first-choice votes for the lowest vote-getter are re-assigned to the second choice, and so on, until someone gets a majority. That change would have enfranchised the Nader voter who didn’t want to hand the election to Bush, or the Buchanan voter who didn’t want to hand it to Gore. It would also challenge the widespread assumption that Americans prefer the middle of the political spectrum.

Campaign reform is an obvious necessity. It could limit the campaign season to a few weeks, as is the case in Europe. It could make a level playing field by assuring equal resources to all serious candidates. It could deflect those resources from misleading ads to informative policy statements and real debates. It could provide campaign money from the people, so our elected officials would understand to whom they are beholden.

Sound impossible? A little crackpot? You know, every idea sounds impossible when it’s first articulated — even democracy, even a balance of powers, even the electoral college. What seems really impossible, at this moment when the trust and faith of our voters have been so insulted by the unfairness of our present electoral system, is that we will put up with it any longer.

]]>The key is learning to learnhttps://grist.org/article/leadership-101/
Mon, 13 Nov 2000 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/leadership-101/During the weekend before Election Day, as midgets battled furiously on warped playing fields, two giants fell, both yielding their lives peacefully, knowingly, with dignity, to cancer.

The better-known one was David Brower, the great outdoorsman and thunderer for the environment. Even in his 70s and 80s he was still shaking up the Sierra Club, inspiring Friends of the Earth, galvanizing college students with his passionate message about the inconceivably ancient, living, evolving earth and the blind arrogance of the upstart Industrial Man. I always thought of David as a reincarnation of the fiery founder of our national parks, John Muir. I can only hope that soul will cycle back to us yet again, continuing to thunder, until we absorb its wisdom.

Don Michael was a quieter giant. Much of his career was spent as a professor of planning and public policy at the University of Michigan. He was a revered advisor to corporate, government, and nonprofit managers, with a gentle way of stating difficult truths. One of his books, published in 1973, set the course for the “futures” movement and for leaders everywhere. It was called “On Learning to Plan — and Planning to Learn.”

The key word there is learn. Along with David Brower’s reverence for the natural world, the one thing I would most wish to pass on to the newly elected leaders of this split, confused nation — whoever those leaders turn out to be — is Don Michael’s commitment to learning.

Real learning, he said, requires three things: admission of uncertainty, error-embracing, and deep self-understanding. None of them easy for a leader in these times. We have set up almost the opposite standards. A leader must pretend to absolute certainty, never make mistakes, or at least never admit them, and never reveal personal vulnerability. All of which is a perfect recipe for not learning.

“To learn requires recognizing what one wants to learn, and that means recognizing what one doesn’t know,” said Michael. He meant that profoundly, not at the level of not knowing what the surplus will be next year, but of not really knowing how the modern globalizing economy works. Not knowing what a voucher system would do to our schools. Or what global warming will be like. Or how to control the spread of weapons of mass destruction. “You know that you do not know; you know that there is no honest way to put a number on something; you do not understand your situation well enough to be in control of it.”

Many of us urgently want to believe that someone, somewhere, preferably someone in charge, does know. Hence we run our campaigns the way we do and politicians act the way they do. We sense deep down that they are bluffing. If we could only admit that, thereby giving our leaders the space to admit that, we could start to learn.

Said Don Michael: What if uncertainty were accepted, and shared as our common condition, and acknowledged by leaders rather than being denied? Surely we can tolerate much more uncertainty when we have others to share it with. [That] would reduce the need to act over-cautiously out of fear of being caught in a mistake. It would reduce the need for those defensive, self-protecting, posturings that make it so hard to act responsibly and compassionately.

If you do not understand your situation well enough to be in control of it, all you can do is live in it and learn from it and try to create possibilities and see what happens as one goes along.

That’s learning. Admitting uncertainty. Trying things. Making mistakes, ideally the small ones that come from failed experiments, rather than the huge ones that come from pretending you know what you’re doing. Learning means staying open to experiments that might not work — which Michael called error-embracing. “It means seeking and using — and sharing — information about what went wrong with what you hoped would go right.”

Learning leadership takes a solid, self-knowing human being. “Both error-embracing and living with high levels of uncertainty emphasize our personal as well as societal vulnerability. Typically we hide our vulnerabilities from ourselves as well as from others. But those who will have the tasks of planning and leading must have a far deeper understanding themselves as selves and as a part of other persons than they usually do today. Without such understanding, and the strength that comes with it, they will too easily succumb to pressures to engineer people rather than to encourage self-discovery — and they will themselves be engineered in the process.”

In 1996, preparing to re-issue his great planning book, Don Michael wrote some paragraphs that seems as if it were written for his nation’s confusion in the week of his death.

The depth of learning to be done grows ever more daunting. Whether that learning can be accomplished remains to be seen.

But, since we don’t understand the dynamics of complex social change under turbulent conditions, there is no reason not to hope — hence to try. First and foremost, we must accept our ignorance — accept that we must learn, and plan in order to do so.

]]>Two brothers talk carbon sequestrationhttps://grist.org/article/how/
https://grist.org/article/how/#commentsMon, 06 Nov 2000 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/how/A while ago I wrote about Jonathan Foley, an environmental scientist at the University of Wisconsin, who is so appalled at the lack of government action on global warming that he has taken matters into his own hands. Through energy efficiency and solar energy, he and his family have greatly reduced their use of gas, oil, or coal (whose burning produces the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide). When they do burn fossil fuel, they see that a tree is planted or a patch of prairie restored to take the carbon dioxide they’ve generated back out of the atmosphere.

Jon Foley has been corresponding with his brother David, who designs “green” buildings in Maine, about whether David can rack up carbon-absorbing credit for his organic garden. When David and his wife Judy started gardening about 10 years ago, their soil tested just 1 percent organic matter. Now it tests 7.7 percent (an astonishingly high number, about twice as high as most farm soils). That difference is made up of carbon taken by plants out of the atmosphere — a reverse greenhouse effect.

Sequestering carbon, one squash at a time.

Jon, the numbers guy, has gone to work estimating David and Judy’s carbon credits. Here, for you gardeners who want to quantify your own contribution to the climate — and for policymakers who’d like to reward farmers for climate-stabilizing behavior — is how he went about it. The quotes are from Jon’s emails to David. I’ve translated units from his proper scientific metrics back to the crazy American system we all understand.

“The biggest uncertainty relates to how deep the organic matter is going into the soil. I assume that the change in soil organic matter is confined to the top 8 inches. I suspect that you’re actually leaching humus into deeper soil, which would affect the result a lot. So this is a conservative estimate.”

Organic matter is about 58 percent carbon. So soil with 1 percent organic matter contains (hmmm, 1 percent of 58 percent of 56 pounds) 0.3 pounds of carbon per square foot. Soil with 7.7 percent organic matter contains 2.5 pounds of carbon per square foot. David and Judy have increased the amount of carbon in every square foot of their garden by 2.2 pounds.

It’s a big garden, 0.4 acres. (Actually it’s a communal garden, which David and Judy share with their neighbors.) That’s 17,424 square feet. Multiply by 2.2 pounds of carbon per square foot — let’s see here — that makes over 38,000 pounds of carbon removed from the atmosphere — 19 tons!

Jon writes to David: “You have sequestered 19 tons of carbon into your garden over the last 10 years. If you think that the soil test is representative of a deeper soil profile (let’s say 16 inches instead of 8), then scale that number up. This is impressive! The average American releases 6 to 6.5 tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. So you have offset about three years of an average American’s emissions.”

David Foley is no average American, given his energy-efficient house and frugal consumption habits. He and Judy have also planted more than a thousand trees and shrubs. I’m willing to give them credit for offsetting their last 10 years of carbon emissions. But, I pointed out to David, he’s not likely to get that soil any richer in humus. What’s he going to do to offset the next 10 years?

He replied, “It’s true that we’ve ‘shot our wad.’ You can never earn more than a one-time credit for tree-planting or building soil organic matter. But if everyone would do that, it would give us a great breathing space to make the transition to sustainable energy sources. And, of course, the organic matter we’ve built up helps the garden grow wonderfully and holds onto water to help us get through droughts.”

This little calculation could go beyond gardening. This month, the world’s nations will reconvene in a climate bargaining session, where a central issue will be how to account for carbon sequestration. If, say, Costa Rica will be charged for the gasoline burned by its growing car fleet, shouldn’t it get credit for the fact that it is restoring its forests? If the U.S. helps Guatemala plant trees, couldn’t we count that against our own rising carbon emissions?

U.S. negotiators will be pushing hard for the idea of paying cash for carbon sequestration. (The Clinton administration would rather pay someone else to plant forests than question our gas-guzzling SUV habit.) If “carbon trading” flies, it seems fair to reward every kind of carbon-fixing, including building soil humus. Farmers who increase the humus content of their soil should be able to charge us all for slowing the crazing of the climate.

By the same token, anyone who levels a forest or runs down soil carbon should have to pay. That’s fair. Climate change puts real and huge costs onto everyone.

Carbon sequestration can only be a temporary strategy toward stabilizing the climate. Jon Foley estimates that if we grew back every forest and restored the humus in all the agricultural land in the world, we would only offset 25 to 30 years of our economy’s present carbon emissions. Still, a turn in that direction could help the climate a bit and farmers a lot.

Says David, “Imagine farmers being able to supplement their incomes by farming the way they should. Imagine a transfer of income from CO2-emitting corporations back to farmers. Wow!”

]]>https://grist.org/article/how/feed/1The dumbing and demeaning of politics is not a minor matterhttps://grist.org/article/the-campaign-glass-is-95-percent-empty/
Mon, 30 Oct 2000 20:00:01 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/the-campaign-glass-is-95-percent-empty/In the spirit of celebrating good news wherever it appears, I would like to point out one excellent development in the presidential campaign. The candidates have flailed at each other so much about numbers — how much of that tax cut really goes to the top 1 percent? how much surplus is there really? — that the press has wakened to its proper role. Even the TV networks are trying, however feebly, to check out what the numbers really might be.

Think how much deception and grief we would have been saved, if the press had always done that.

So, having allocated 5 percent of this column to the full part of the glass, I can spend the rest pointing to the 95 percent of Campaign 2000 that is empty.

Things started going terribly wrong when TV became our main information source and politics was put in the hands of marketers. Now even stump speeches, convention addresses, and “debates” are essentially ads.

Ads do not employ the human faculty of critical thinking. Quite the contrary, they are designed to shut it down. Ads are emotional appeals. They reach into our psyches and press hot buttons. If at first they don’t succeed, they do it again and again and again, until they pound into our defenseless cerebral matter impressions of reality that are purest fiction.

If we have heard it 146 times, there must be something to it, right? Thus we are convinced that sports utility vehicles are safe, that junk food tastes good, that we can save money by going out and buying stuff, or that conservatives can be compassionate.

Ads, soundbites, thought-stoppers. If your opponent says you are giving a tax break to the wealthy, you say just two words: “fuzzy math.” Over and over. That not only diverts attention from the tax break and throws an insult at your opponent, it removes fact and rigor from the discussion. You can hide any outrage — a spending plan that exceeds the highest possible surplus, handouts to campaign donors, erosion of the Social Security system. Fuzzy math. Let’s talk about something real, like the way vouchers will improve public schools by taking money away from them. But let’s not use any numbers.

Constant repetition of nonsense erodes thinking; it is also the key to character assassination. Bill Clinton did something unsavory that distressingly many members of Congress have also done. He never accused them, but they piled on him, ginned up an impeachment process, and still won’t let anyone forget. They did the same with endlessly repeated Whitewater accusations. It took millions of dollars and many years to show that those accusations were baseless. But many of us still have a vague impression that something real happened there.

Along the same vein, the New York Times just tried to find the point at which Al Gore claimed that he invented the Internet or that he inspired the novel “Love Story.” Guess what? In both cases he said something much more modest and totally accurate. However we now have been told hundreds of times not only that he made those outlandish claims, but that he always makes outlandish claims.

Tricks like these, used to some extent by both parties, but much more skillfully by the right wing, are no accident. Along with focus groups, push-polls, photo ops, and all the other manipulations of the modern campaign process, they are designed to drown the voters in misinformation. George W. is not so dim as we thought and very good-hearted. Al is not only boring, but grandiose. And those are the qualities by which we should choose our president. Not by his experience (which is glossed over), nor by his stands on issues (which are muffled or exaggerated), but by whether we “like” him. I have actually heard TV commentators challenge viewers to think hard about which face they want to see on their screen for the next four years. (Brad Pitt for president?)

Whatever democratic campaigns should be, they should not be tidal waves of cynical, scornful flimflam. Candidates should not have “handlers”; we should not be choosing between genial, empty-headed, ambitious puppets moved by backstage plotters with agendas we never see. Responsible media in a democracy should focus on substance, not image. People with money, power, cameras, and microphones should not dominate or limit or distort the political discourse. No one should treat the voters as a bunch of gullible rubes.

But they are rubes, I have heard journalists and media executives and campaign planners assert. People don’t want to hear about issues. They won’t follow complicated arguments. They only care about personalities.

To which I have to say, if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Try speaking to the public’s intelligence and you’ll discover that it’s there.

The dumbing and demeaning of politics is not a minor matter. It is a severe malfunction in the power structure of a momentarily mighty, supposedly democratic nation. If it is not corrected, that nation will destroy itself, as other mighty nations have done when those in power lost all restraint in their eagerness and their ability to deceive the people.

]]>Questions that should have been asked in the presidential debateshttps://grist.org/article/meadows-debate/
Tue, 24 Oct 2000 03:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/meadows-debate/Well, the “debates,” carefully controlled by the major political parties, are over. I guess it was too much to expect that hard or important questions would be asked. But the candidates are still on the road, where they might be queried by an unscripted citizen. Or by a reporter who believes that fitness to lead a nation rests upon criteria more stringent than whether a person sighs or smirks, what color tie he’s wearing, whether he’s tanned or pale, whether he makes a “gaffe.”

Here’s what I keep hoping someone will ask:

Both candidates: You have defined your campaigns around how you would spend a budget surplus. Meanwhile both your parties in Congress have been violating the budgetary agreements that have created the surplus, increasing spending, often for pork-barrel projects unrelated to any priorities you are proposing. What do you intend to do to bring your party under control, so there might actually be a surplus?

Whether or not you succeed in doing that, you know that future surpluses are theoretical, based on a “rosy scenario” of steady economic growth. Suppose that scenario does not come to pass. The surplus shrinks. Which of the three priorities you have emphasized — tax cuts, increased spending (especially on the military), or debt retirement (to protect Social Security) — would you give up first? Why?

You can call him Al.

Vice President Gore: You are well aware that many of your programs, from health care reform to campaign reform to environmental protection, have been blocked by the Republican majority in Congress. Suppose you are elected and you continue to face a similar majority. How can you possibly keep your campaign promises? What can you do to get your programs passed that Bill Clinton hasn’t tried already? Why aren’t you campaigning actively for a Democratic Congress?

Gov. Bush: You claim to be a healer, able to cross partisan lines. Surely you know that leaders of your party have been practicing unceasingly nasty partisan politics. Do you intend to rein them in? If so, how?

Both candidates: You both celebrate “free trade,” the World Trade Organization, “globalization.” The people protesting globalization in the streets of Seattle last year were not just wild anarchists. They were farmers, workers, scientists, professors, students, economists, all of whom claim that unrestricted trade can be a danger to the environment, to workers, and to communities.

Do you think they’re wrong? If not, if some of their concerns might be valid, what, in your enthusiasm for expanded trade, do you propose to do about their concerns?

Vice President Gore: Congressional Republicans have been undermining our environmental laws by attaching “riders” to important spending bills, which the president must sign to keep the government running. Every year there are riders, for example, to exempt logging in national forests from the forestry laws, or to exempt particular federal water projects from the Endangered Species Act, or to permit mining operations to dump toxic wastes on federal lands. President Clinton has signed some of those riders into law and refused to sign others — in one famous case “shutting down the government” to make his point.

What will be your policy on anti-environmental riders? Will you sign none of them or some of them? If some of them, what criteria will you use to decide?

Curious George.

Gov. Bush: Do you think members of your party should undermine federal environmental laws with these riders? If they continue to do so, will you sign any or all riders?

Both candidates: You each favor the death penalty. You have both said you believe it has a deterrent effect. Do you have any evidence for that? If there were in fact no evidence — if, for example, the murder rate were as high in places with a death penalty as it is in places without one — would you still support government executions?

Gov. Bush: If, as you propose, we explore for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, geologists say we’re not likely to find more than a six-month supply. In the lower 48 states, oil production has been going down since 1970, because our wells are running dry. As president what would you do to deal not only with the short-term but with the long-term energy problem?

Vice President Gore: You know that the proposed Kyoto climate treaty is only a baby step toward stabilizing the global climate. Yet the U.S. fails to conform even with that treaty; our greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Your book calls global warming a “massive, unprecedented — some say unethical — experiment.” Why have you said scarcely a word about this issue during your campaign?

Both candidates: Does it fit your definition of “democracy” that people or interests with more money should have more access to and influence upon government than those with less money? Do you think that people on the public payroll should spend significant time soliciting private donations? Do you really believe that large campaign contributions have absolutely no effect on public policy? If not, what do you propose to do about it?

]]>Should we be fluoridating our drinking water?https://grist.org/article/a9/
Mon, 16 Oct 2000 20:00:01 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/a9/Back when I was a chemistry major, my professors told me in no uncertain terms that water fluoridation is a boon. It prevents millions of children from getting cavities. People who oppose it are hysterical know-nothings. We budding chemists absorbed both the specific lesson and the general lesson. Fluoride is good. Scientists know best.

What would you do to protect his teeth?

At just that time Rachel Carson was questioning scientific wisdom with regard to another issue: pesticides. I was taught that she was hysterical too. However, as I read more widely and went beyond chemistry to ecology, I decided she was right. While I continued to respect science greatly, I came to see that some scientists can be hasty in judgment, narrow in understanding, out of date, or more loyal to their ideology or source of income than to the truth.

But I didn’t question fluoride. The consensus was strong. The dentists were behind it. Toothpaste makers hyped it. Half the nation’s cities fluoridate their water with no obvious ill effect. I classed fluoride opponents with UFO spotters and horoscope believers. Loonies.

I never looked at the evidence. I was thoroughly unscientific.

So my sins finally caught up with me. People in towns on the verge of fluoridation kept asking me to write a column on the subject. I delayed. I made excuses. They sent me piles of information, which I didn’t read — until, out of curiosity, one day I did.

To fluoridate or not to fluoridate?

Then I went to web. Then I started asking my scientific colleagues. The deeper I got into the topic, the more confused I got. Fluoridation is like capital punishment or gun control. Wildly polarized. Vested interests. Each side hoarding up selective evidence to prove itself right. Enough conflicting evidence to keep both sides happy. My head spun.

I did come out of the process more open-minded. Not all pro-fluoridation folks have done their homework. Not all anti-fluoridation folks are loonies — they include dentists and scientists and 1,500 employees of the U.S. EPA. Both sides exaggerate a lot.

Here, for what they’re worth, are some conclusions I drew after my whirlwind immersion in this contentious topic.

Fluoride does protect against cavities. Back in the 1940s, a dentist noted that people with “Texas teeth” — brown, mottled teeth that came from naturally high fluoride levels in their water — also had unusually low cavity rates. Comparisons of communities with varying natural fluoride levels led to the conclusion that about one part per million in drinking water was ideal to reduce tooth decay without triggering the mottling (which is called fluorosis).

Tap water isn’t the only source of fluoride. That dosage of one part per million was calculated at a time when there was no fluoride in toothpaste. Nowadays we also get fluoride in soft drinks, in air pollution, in fruit juice, in children’s vitamin supplements. Studies over time seem to show that rising exposure to fluoride from other sources makes water fluoridation less protective of teeth and more likely to cause fluorosis.

Fluoride is toxic. It doesn’t take much of it to kill vegetation, fish, mussels, crabs, shrimp, cattle. In human beings overexposure not only mottles teeth, it weakens bone. There are scientific papers linking fluoride to cancer and brain damage. The fluoride used by municipal water districts comes from phosphate fertilizer plants in Florida, where it is stripped from smokestacks to reduce air pollution. It contains not only fluoride, but heavy metals and other contaminants. If it were not put in drinking water, it would have to be treated as hazardous waste.

There are arguments, even in the vaunted Journal of the American Dental Association, about how fluoride actually works. It may be by ingestion, getting itself implanted into tooth enamel. It may be by washing the mouth, inhibiting the growth of plaque bacteria. Fluoride in toothpaste may be just as effective as fluoride in drinking water.

The epidemiological evidence doesn’t seem to be compelling either way. If you compare one fluoridated city (say, Toronto) with one unfluoridated one (Vancouver), you can pick your cities to get any result you want. Most of Europe does not use fluoride, much of America does. Is there more tooth decay there and more bone damage here? Expert panels have come down either way. That suggests that neither the positive nor the negative effects of fluoride (at low concentrations) can be very big.

Given the uncertainties, given the variation in intake from other sources, given the possibility of overdose, given known toxicity to other forms of life, if I lived in a city deciding about fluoridation, I would ask, isn’t there a better way to protect children’s teeth? Why fluoridate the whole water supply, the millions of gallons with which we flush toilets and take showers and water lawns, if our only target is children’s teeth? Why expose all people to a chemical of arguable benefit and some risk in a way they can’t control? Why dump that chemical into water supplies and then sewage plants and then waterways with almost no understanding of what happens to it after that?

Even back when the League of Women Voters first televised confrontations between presidential candidates, they weren’t debates. At best they were stiff, unnatural political discussions. Now that the two major political parties run them, they are carefully controlled soundbite gotcha matches. Like most everything about our campaign process, they insult the voters and undermine democracy.

Debates ought to inform. I doubt that anyone listening to this year’s first presidential “debate” could say what the two candidates actually propose to do about medicine for seniors or education or social security. Put it in a lockbox — exactly what does that mean and why is it necessary?

Debates should explore assumptions and sources. Bush and Gore threw inconsistent numbers at each other for 90 minutes. No one stopped to say, “Wait a minute, let’s get to the bottom of this. Where did that number come from and why is it different from your opponent’s number?”

Debates should have basic ground rules, such as: Answer the question you are asked. If you try to run away verbally, you will be interrupted and hauled back to the topic at hand.

Repetition of obvious nonsense should be ruled out of bounds and a penalty assessed (three free minutes to your opponent). For example:

Irrelevant insinuations about “character.” From his harping on “restoring dignity to the presidency,” one would think that George W. Bush has never noticed that Al Gore is not Bill Clinton. To tar Gore with repeated references to the unsavory conduct of another man is just plain foul.

Accusations about the other side’s fundraising practices, unless your own are completely above board. Let him who is without sin throw the stones. If no one can, let’s get serious about campaign reform.

Claiming to cause economic prosperity. A president does not create economic booms. He lucks into them. A president does not have the power to bring an economy up or down. Everyone knows that. Cut it out.

Truth-confounding jabs, such as Bush’s taunt about many of Gore’s suggested policies: “Why didn’t you do it in the last eight years?” He knows perfectly well that his own party, in control of Congress, stopped it. (Why Gore doesn’t say that back is beyond me.)

Mom-and-apple-pie platitudes. Such as the whole discussion about education, something everyone values but presidents can do little about. Jim Lehrer asked the right question here: “How by supplying only 6 percent of the education budget can you solve any education problems?” The answer I heard was “require testing.” Kind of like attacking a fever by requiring temperature-taking. No voice was allowed to widen the discussion to the real problems behind problem schools, namely poverty and discrimination.

That’s the worst thing about the “debates,” the questions not asked and the candidates not on the podium. The two controlling parties narrow the discussion to the cramped middle of the political spectrum. It’s as if they were trying to spell out the nation’s political choices using only the letters from L to P, pretending that the rest of the alphabet doesn’t exist.

So when energy prices come up, Bush wants to dig up all the coal and pump up the remaining oil in America, which Gore also wants to do, but Gore also says vague things about alternative fuels. No acknowledgment that either of these guys, who want to lead the world’s biggest carbon-emitting nation, have heard of the greenhouse effect — even though Gore has written a book on the subject. The one candidate who would make an impassioned speech about the craziness of ruining the climate in order to drive SUVs, the guy who would point out that oil and coal are the technologies of the 19th century, not the 21st, the person who would make efficiency and solar the center of his energy policy was not even allowed into the room, much less on the platform.

Gore and Bush muscled it out to see who is most macho about military spending. Who was there to suggest cleaning up the enormous waste in that spending? That position doesn’t fit between L and P; it’s over in the Ss and Ts somewhere. Who wondered whether, in a world of terrorists, big armies and weapons are at all relevant to national security? Sorry, that’s way out at W or X, or A and B.

The L to P candidates argued about how to use taxpayer money to pay for overpriced drugs. The candidates disallowed from the debate would have asked why drugs are overpriced.

From L to P they argue over how to make HMOs honor patients’ rights. Over at A and B they note that other civilized countries’ drug and medical expenses are half of our own, with higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality, and with more doctor choice and less waiting for appointments than any HMO offers. And medical care is equally available to all citizens.

Yes, there is a real difference between L and P. But what if the real solutions and opportunities lie over at A or G or U or Z? How can anyone who knows how to think, or who treasures real democracy, or who sees the selection of the president as a process on a higher level than a sports match, find any meaning or guidance in these so-called “debates?”

]]>Consumers have the power to fight factory farmshttps://grist.org/article/mcchicken/
Mon, 02 Oct 2000 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/mcchicken/According to the rules of the World Trade Organization, governments cannot block the import of a product on the basis of how it is produced. So what if a rainforest has been cut down or a stream polluted or an animal tortured or workers paid pitiful wages? That’s the concern of the producing country, not the consuming one. Consumers should care only that they get what they want as cheaply as possible.

Of course consumers everywhere recognize the ridiculousness of this proposition. We are not robots who just want to plunk down money, get stuff, and take no responsibility for the consequences. Whatever the WTO or any government says, we can exert amazing power by refusing to buy things that are made in ways that violate our values.

Nike, Starbucks, and Home Depot have learned that lesson. Nike found out the hard way that we don’t want athletic shoes made by people who labor under intolerable conditions for pennies per hour. Starbucks has agreed to supply us with organic, shade-grown coffee. (The shade-grown part is to provide winter homes for migrating songbirds.) We have convinced Home Depot not to sell anything made by cutting down old-growth forests.

European supermarkets, pushed by consumer demand, are not only refusing to shelve foods made from genetically modified crops, but are going organic storewide. Frito-Lay has asked suppliers of potatoes and corn for its chips to avoid gene-splicing.

McDonald’s has been hit by consumer protests so often that the company is downright jumpy trying to foresee our next principled protest. First we refused to buy hamburgers packaged in styrofoam that contains ozone-destroying chemicals. Next it was South American beef grazed on pastures carved from rainforest. Now McDonald’s has joined Frito-Lay in asking its suppliers to phase out genetically engineered spuds. They will still be fried in oil from gene-spliced soybeans; apparently McDonald’s hasn’t noticed that yet, or hopes that we haven’t.

Recently McDonald’s responded to consumer power in another arena. This one company buys 1.5 billion eggs a year. McDonald’s has just asked its egg suppliers to pay attention to the living conditions of their hens. The birds must be kept in larger cages. (A skeptical farmer tells me the cages will be increased from the size of a Kleenex box to the size of a brownie pan.) They must no longer be “debeaked,” a practice that keeps closely confined birds from pecking each other. And they must not have food or water withheld to increase egg production.

Animal rights activists have forced these changes. They’re out to stop the inhumane practices of factory farms, where calves, pigs, or chickens are treated more like interchangeable machines than like living creatures. More power to the animal rights folks. But if we’re going to direct consumer power toward factory farming, there’s still a long way to go. We should aim above all to eliminate the use of antibiotics in animal feed.

When you cram a hundred thousand hens together in Kleenex-box-sized or even brownie-pan-sized cages, you create a perfect environment for the transmission of diseases. The same goes for beef and hog feedlots (and people in airplanes). The solution to this problem has been to lace the feed with antibiotics. About 23 million pounds of antibiotics are fed to animals in the United States every year — not used for sick animals, but fed to well ones.

Chickens are all cooped up.

Photo: Defending Farm Animals.

Jamming animals together is bound to spread disease. Keeping them in the constant presence of low-level antibiotics is bound to spread antibiotic-resistant disease. Our animal factories are active sources of drug-resistant salmonella and E. coli and other microbes, some of which infect people. In Europe and America, where animal factories are widespread, people are showing up in hospitals with infections that are resistant to four or five different antibiotics. In the U.S. 14,000 deaths per year are attributed to drug-resistant microbes.

It is crazy to undermine the effectiveness of antibiotics, the greatest health breakthrough of the 20th century, just to make cheaper meat. Doctors are pleading for the control of antibiotics in the meat industry. Both the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization have issued stern warnings, which in the U.S. have not been turned into government regulation. Meat producers are major campaign contributors.

Raising animals in concentration camps is a bad idea for a dozen reasons, ranging from cruelty to drug resistance to unmanageable manure piles. If we don’t end this practice, it will end itself, when antibiotics can no longer stave off diseases. If we would like to keep antibiotics effective, consumer action is the only way to go (short of campaign finance reform).

There are still farms that raise animals in natural, healthy conditions, with space, light, and movement, and without feeding antibiotics. Turn your consumer power in their direction. Wherever you buy meat or eggs, be willing to ask: Where does this come from? How was it raised? Ask loudly. Ask at McDonald’s.

]]>How can we make environmental laws work better?https://grist.org/article/won/
Mon, 18 Sep 2000 20:00:01 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/won/Now that I’ve suffered under one firsthand, I can understand why people hate environmental laws.

On a map of our farm filed away at the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources is a fateful dot. It stands for an endangered Siberian Chive, observed by someone decades ago. This dot popped up when we applied under Vermont’s Act 250, one of the best land use laws of the nation, to build 22 small “green” homes clustered on four of our 270 acres.

The dot lies near a brook that trickles through a hayfield. It is not within sight of the proposed construction. But Act 250 brings every inch of our land under scrutiny. So, to preserve the chive, the state says we must maintain a 50-foot no-mow buffer on either side of the brook.

That buffer would render unusable several acres of a small field that has been dutifully hayed for the past 40 years right up to the brushy bank of the brook. “If haying is going to do in that chive,” I pointed out, “the chive is done in. If you can show me even one plant, I’ll protect it with my life. But why should we lose the use of good bottomland for a chive that isn’t there?”

We compromised on 25 feet, still too much, in my opinion, but one of the less infuriating outcomes of the year we have spent with Act 250.

I want to reiterate: It is a great law. It requires every developer of more than 10 living units to prove to regulatory agencies and the public that the proposed land use change will not endanger anyone’s water supply. The change must not cause undue erosion. It must dispose of wastewater safely. It must not cause air pollution or use too much energy or ruin scenic views or threaten wetlands or extinguish species or burden the schools or bankrupt the town. These are reasonable requirements. I think they should be imposed on every new construction in every state in the Union.

But something has gone wrong when the workings of a law start undermining its very purpose.

As, for example, the decision about composting toilets. We think it is environmentally wrong to use drinking water to wash away human waste, and then to dump that waste, processed or not, into streams or groundwater, where its nutrients are pollutants, rather than back to the soil, where the nutrients are a resource. Hence we asked to install composting toilets, which, I’m happy to report, the state permitted.

But it threw in this kicker. When, after a year or two, our toilets have accumulated compost, we are not allowed to take it out, mix it with yard trimmings, compost it further, and spread it around our roses. Rather, we are required to call a licensed septic tank hauler to take the compost to a municipal sewage treatment system.

That defeats the whole logic of composting toilets.

There are several more such crazy dictates scattered through our pages-thick permit, which took more than a year to obtain and added roughly $5,000 to the cost of each home. My purpose here is not to complain about the specifics, the delays, or even the expense, though much of that expense was unnecessary to any conceivable environmental protection. My purpose is to reflect upon good laws that go bad.

Though I have periodically been incensed at it, I do not conclude, as my friends to the right do, that we should sweep Act 250 away. I have no doubt we’d be worse off without it. I’m also not ready to condemn the dozens of state regulators we’ve dealt with. Most of them did their best to be helpful and even cheerful. But they labor under conditions that turn their work sour.

Partly because of the incessant anti-bureaucrat, anti-tax rantings of my friends to the right, they are underpaid, overworked, and often undertrained. State salaries may suffice for the young, the unambitious, or the unusually virtuous, but most professionals can earn much more in the private sector, from which we had to hire them, for example, to research the expected water-flow reductions of composting toilets, something public-sector professionals ought to know. They have no time to know. They’re overloaded.

Furthermore, their jobs have evolved into stopping abuse, rather than helping people do the right thing. They know a grossly dysfunctional septic tank design when they see one. They can tell us what not to do. But there’s no opportunity, no time, no leeway for them to help those of us who are honestly eager to do the right thing.

Most of the folks administering environmental laws took their jobs because they care about the environment. They should be able to interact with us as partners, instead of trying to catch us doing things wrong, or trying to protect us from ourselves. They should be well paid and well trained — after all, they are the daily guardians of our air and water and soil. Investing more public funds in them could cost far less and produce a better environment than setting up a system in which private-sector hydrogeologists and civil engineers and lawyers must do constant battle with them.

If we come to hate the laws, eventually there won’t be any. Environmentalists, of all people, need to care not only what laws are on the books, but how they actually work.

]]>Why do we compete even though we know it hurts us?https://grist.org/article/about/
https://grist.org/article/about/#commentsMon, 11 Sep 2000 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/about/

Not beary funny.

Photo: Art Wolfe, Inc.

I’ve heard the joke about the bear before, and so, probably, have you. Two guys are sitting outside their tent in a forest campsite when they see a huge angry bear charging toward them. One starts lacing up his running shoes. The other says, “Are you crazy? You’ll never outrun that bear!” The first says, “I don’t have to outrun the bear. I only have to outrun you.”

Ha ha — kind of sick humor, really, down the memory hole it goes with all the other jokes. But recently it came back up for me in a setting that got me to keep thinking about it.

It was a meeting about the future of the forest industry. We were talking about the rapid growth of sawmills in New England. We were wondering whether the forest can grow trees fast enough to supply the rising capacity of the mills. Wondering whether mill owners ask that question before they expand. Wondering what would happen if (or when) the mills, through their independent expansion decisions, collectively outgrow the forest.

Folks who know the industry well were saying, in effect, that the mills expand because they have to, to adopt new labor-saving and wood-saving technology, to cut costs, to underbid each other in the marketplace. They can’t know the expansion plans of other mills until those plans are underway. They have no way of tracking the combined wood demand of all mills against the total supply capacity of the forest. They only know that if, by expanding, they can cut their costs, then they can survive to expand again. If they fall behind, a bigger, cheaper mill takes their business. Grow or die.

That’s when an experienced forester told the joke about the bear. It cut deep, because we’ve been hearing the same story in other contexts.

Corn-ing the market.

Corn farmers in the Midwest, who get corn yields that are the envy of the world, will do or buy just about anything that will help them grow more corn. Fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide, gene-spliced seed, newfangled tractor, more land — whatever boosts output, they go for it.

They also know — it’s amazing to hear every blessed one of them say it — that as they put more corn on the market, the price of corn goes down, down, down. The more corn they grow, the lower the price, and the more they have to grow just to make the same income. They’re on a treadmill that no one is turning but them. Each one knows that if she’s the first to adopt the new technology, her yield gets a bit ahead of the others, and she survives. If she doesn’t, hers is the next farm on the auction block.

You don’t have to beat the bear, you just have to beat the other poor suckers who are trying to beat the bear.

A shrimp trawler in the Gulf of Mexico.

Photo: Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program.

You can see the same thing happening with shrimp fishing fleets in the Gulf of Mexico. Everyone there, from the fisheries experts to the guys working on the boats, seems to agree that there are about 30 percent more trawlers out in the Gulf than there should be for the fishery to be profitable. Another way to say this is, 30 percent of the time they lose money fishing and would be better off staying ashore.

Because shrimp are wonderfully prolific, this boat excess doesn’t appear to be wiping out the resource — yet, anyway. (That is happening in dozens of other fisheries.) It is just wiping out profits. Yet every fleet captain puts all he can into bigger, faster, more efficient boats to beat the other guys to that limited supply of shrimp. Since the resource is used to capacity, for every boat that catches more, another catches less. Grow or die.

One sick joke applies to three very different industries. Probably many other industries as well.

Even in these three I know, the cost of trying to outrun the other guy to escape the bear is immense. There’s the wasted investment, the idled machines, the laid-off workers, the bankrupt families, the dying communities. There’s the incalculable environmental cost of pushing a resource to, or beyond, its limit. The northeast forest has spreading clear-cuts and ever-younger trees. The seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico is constantly plowed up by shrimp trawlers. Tons of bycatch, young fish of many species, are dumped out dead from shrimp nets. Millions of dollars worth of fertilizers and pesticides wash off cornfields into the wells and streams of the Mississippi watershed.

Somehow we have created an economy that keeps our most basic and necessary producers on the edge of ruin, living in fear, preying on each other, wasting financial, human, social, and natural assets at an enormous rate.

If we had just a minute to think, might it not be wiser to stop racing each other against disaster, and start working together to address the problem of the bear?

]]>https://grist.org/article/about/feed/1Reality Biteshttps://grist.org/article/reality/
Tue, 05 Sep 2000 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/reality/Linda Harrar is an independent filmmaker, based in Boston but usually traveling the world producing documentaries for NOVA and other PBS programs. Through the lens of the camera, she sees a lot. In the editing room she sees it over and over. It sinks in deep.

So she had a strong reaction to the CBS “reality TV” series Survivor.

A “survivor” in Haiti.

Photo: U.N. Photos.

“I have searing memories of true struggles to survive,” she wrote on the web last week. “In Mexico City we filmed people living in cardboard houses in a dump, recycling the garbage they slept on. In Brazilian favelas we met women who had borne 20 children because they had no access to contraceptives. Elderly grandparents in Kenya have stepped in to raise AIDS orphans. In Haiti we filmed children with swollen bellies and orange hair, telltale signs of malnutrition.

“I try to include hope in my programs and people who struggle against the odds and do succeed. They are legion.”

And, of course, these true survivors bear no resemblance to the 16 folks who volunteered to go to a CBS-chosen island, where they were on camera day and night living on fish and rats plus plentiful rice and clean water supplied by the network. And probably a medical team just off-camera if someone became ill. And a million-dollar prize for the person left on the island after a series of silly games and unpopularity contests eliminated all other contenders. And they call this “reality TV!”

Linda Harrar points out, “Reality for half the world’s population is surviving on less than $2 a day. A billion people lack clean drinking water. On Indonesian islands near where Survivor was filmed, people eat rats regularly — because they have to.

“Around the world, a quarter of a million children die each week of malnutrition and preventable diseases. It doesn’t cost much to take the first step in protecting a child’s life — $17 in vaccinations.” Because she often hires helicopters herself, Linda knows that it must have cost about $500 to send the Survivor helicopter to drop off a slice of pizza to the winner of one of the contrived games on the show. That would be enough for vaccinations for 29 kids.

Of course it’s a pittance compared to the total cost of making that show, not to mention the million dollar prize at the end.

A million dollars. Vaccinations for 59,000 children.

Was it the million dollars that made people watch? Was it the suspense of not knowing how the story would come out? Was it a sort of atavistic enjoyment, watching other folks get low-down and grubby?

Are the networks correct in their assessment that we would never watch a real cliff-hanger about the life challenges of truly endangered people? Or are they wrong but unwilling to find that out, because watching actual reality TV wouldn’t put us in the right mood for shampoo ads?

Is it true that, as T. S. Eliot once said, “Humankind cannot bear much reality.”

Or is that quote just easy modern cynicism of the sort that unfortunately imbues our TV networks? What if we used the miraculous possibilities of television to be in touch with our real world, to get to know each other? My guess is that it would waken our minds to problems and possibilities, instead of dulling us with plastic-fantastic dilemmas dreamed up by producers in L.A. and New York who operate daily under the assumption that we are manipulable idiots.

I don’t think we are. I don’t think we could watch the real lives of real people very long without insisting on some simple changes in the world. Such as fewer silly game prizes and more vaccinations. Linda Harrar quotes James Grant, the former director of UNICEF, who once asked a young Ethiopian girl, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Her reply: “Alive!”

Says Linda, “That’s what I call a real Survivor.“

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Reality Bites on Sep 5, 2000.

]]>The Gamblerhttps://grist.org/article/gambler/
Mon, 28 Aug 2000 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/gambler/“If I gamble, I usually gamble at high-stakes, high-payoff games.” That’s a boast not from James Bond, but from a chemist speaking to the prestigious journal Science (the July 14 issue, from which all quotes but the last one in this column are taken). His name is Peter Schultz. He works at Scripps Research Institute and at a new Genomics Institute created by Novartis, a company deep into genetic engineering. What he’s gambling with is the chemistry of life.

Image: Courtesy DOE Human Genome Project.

To understand his bold scheme, we need to take a short detour here to remind ourselves of that chemistry.

Everything starts with the DNA molecule, a long chain with billions of links. Each link is one of four chemical “letters,” C, G, A, or T. A sequence of three letters (TAC or GCT, for example) makes up one “word” of genetic code.

Through a set of exquisite translations, the code tells living cells how to build proteins. Proteins are chains with tens of thousands of links, each of which is one of 20 different amino acids. Each triplet in the DNA code stands for one kind of amino acid. CTA stands for leucine, GCA stands for alanine, and so forth.

How do you build a chimp?

How does a code for proteins specify how to build a bacterium, a lily, a cow, a chimpanzee, or you? Well, the proteins coded by DNA are enzymes. They supervise and enhance chemical reactions. If you have brown eyes, your DNA carries the code for an enzyme that helps synthesize brown pigment. Enzymes direct the unfolding of the developing embryo, the branching of nerve networks in the brain, the ability of the stomach to digest carbohydrates. DNA even carries code for enzymes that turn on and off the production of enzymes — so the brown pigment is made only in the eye and carbohydrate digestion happens only in the stomach.

The orchestration is stupendous. The chemistry of life, so common around us, not to mention within us, is awesome. Let us pause here for a moment of humility and wonder — feelings that, to judge from the Science article, Peter Schultz is far too busy to indulge in.

“Here’s a guy who runs at 800 miles per hour,” reporter Robert Service writes of Schultz. “You have a conversation and he’s three thoughts ahead of you. You start to say something and he answers your question saying ‘I know what you’re going to say.'” He even knows what God was going to say. He summarizes his research question: “If God had worked a seventh day, what would life look like?”

To put it more concretely, why should there just be four DNA letters? Why that boring CGAT? What if we put in an X or a Y? And why code for just 20 amino acids? Let’s invent some new ones that life has never seen before and then invent some DNA to code for them!

“What we really want to do,” says Schultz, “is build an organism — a living organism — where you can add a 21st amino acid to the growth medium and it takes up that amino acid and puts it selectively into a protein.”

He hasn’t done that yet, but a colleague says, “I think if anyone can do it, Pete Schultz’s lab is the place where it can get done.” He has already tricked cellular translators into sticking more than 80 non-natural amino acids into proteins, but so far the process is low-yielding and hit-or-miss. He has already added a new “letter” to DNA and gotten enzymes to copy it. “I think it’s no longer a question of will it work, but how long it will take.”

The possible benefits of such research cited in the article are mainly scientific. To add a fluorescent tag to show where proteins end up in cells. To build in heavy atoms that will aid in protein crystallography. To show how life might have evolved on another planet. Maybe to design better drugs or better catalysts for industrial processes.

One of Schultz’s colleagues sees larger consequences; it “means reengineering 3.5 billion years of evolution.” That’s not meant as a criticism. All the scientists quoted, including the Science reporter, seem to be dazzled, maybe jealous, but not disturbed. The only note of caution comes from a graduate student: “I used to joke with [Schultz] that we would know the project was complete when we saw people protesting outside the window.”

The Science reporter does admit: “Such experiments are likely to make many people a little queasy and raise prickly questions about safety and ethical concerns.” Then he quotes Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, who says, “At the end of the day, I don’t see any fundamental amorality to making synthetic DNA to regulate a synthetic life-form.”

I would have quoted Erwin Chargaff, one of the grand old men of molecular biology, who wrote in the mid 1970s, also in Science, “You can stop splitting the atom; you can stop visiting the moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life. … It will survive you and your children and your children’s children. … Have we the right to counteract irreversibly the evolutionary wisdom of millions of years in order to satisfy the ambition and the curiosity of a few scientists?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Gambler on Aug 28, 2000.

In some ways the world food situation hasn’t changed for decades. There are still millions of starving people. There are still places where so much food is grown that it has to be thrown away. Fertilizers and pesticides pollute the countryside; soil erodes; groundwater tables drop. Every year when the new statistics come out, I flip through and think, “Ho hum.” It’s easy to become inured to tragedy if it goes on long enough on a big enough scale.

This year, though, I took time to read the fine print in the food and agriculture section of the Worldwatch Institute’s annual book Vital Signs. I found some surprises, which I will convey here in the form of a quiz, to see whether they are news to you, too.

1. The world’s top grain-producing nation is:

a. China b. The United States c. India d. Russia

The answer is China by a long shot (1999 harvest 395 million tons). Next comes the U.S. (333 million tons), then India (185 million tons). Russia used to be a grain power; now its output is in free-fall, wheat harvest down by over 30 percent, corn harvest less than half of what it once was. When your economic system collapses, a lot goes down with it. And, as China demonstrates, the reverse is also true.

By the way, the numbers above demonstrate clearly that America does not “feed the world.” U.S. farmers grow about one-sixth of the world grain harvest, most of which we consume at home. We do have the world’s largest production excess; therefore we are the biggest grain exporter. Our exports — about 5 percent of world production — go primarily to feed animals in Europe and Japan.

2. The share of the world grain crop fed to animals is:

a. 70 percent b. 55 percent c. 37 percent

The answer is c. More than a third of the grain harvest is used for animal feed. Almost all the rice is eaten directly by people, but 70 percent of the corn and about half the wheat goes to pigs, chickens, and cows, in that order.

3. The crop that covers the largest area in the U.S. is:

a. Corn b. Wheat c. Soybeans

Oh, soy!

Soybeans, the fastest growing crop in the world. World production has increased nine-fold since 1950. Half of that is grown in the U.S. Brazil is the next largest producer, then Argentina, then China, where soybean cultivation originated. Only about a tenth of the soybeans grown are eaten directly by humans. The rest are crushed and pressed, yielding almost a third of the world’s cooking oil and more than half the oil-seed meal used in animal feed.

4. The amount of grain produced per person in the world is going:

a. Up b. Down

If that question hadn’t had “per person” in it, the answer would have been “up.” But grain output per capita peaked in 1984 and has fallen by about 10 percent since. The world’s farmers are not keeping up with population growth. There seem to be three reasons for that: the collapse of Soviet production, the steady decline in African production, and the leveling off of yields in the highest-yielding places, such as Europe and the U.S.

5. The fastest-growing agricultural technology is:

a. Genetically modified crops b. Organic farming

This is a trick question, because the answer just reversed itself. Last year it would have been genetically modified crops, which expanded in just four years from zero to almost 100 million acres (almost all in the U.S., Argentina, and Canada). Organic farming, after decades of persistent growth, is estimated to cover only 17 million acres worldwide.

GM crack corn, and we do care.

However, having run into market resistance and in some countries government regulation, farmers are reversing their headlong rush to biotech. The area planted in transgenic crops is 15 to 25 percent less this year than last. Organic area continues to grow by about 20 percent per year.

The use of genetically modified crops appears to have reduced slightly the use of insecticides on cotton and corn, but increased greatly the use of herbicides on soybeans. The growth of organic farming, of course, reduces the use of fertilizers and pesticides on everything.

Under its large, steady trends, world agriculture is changing. Depending on what you look at, you can perceive pending good news or impending disaster. The mighty can fall; the lowly can rise. The balance between food to eat and mouths to feed continues to be wildly different from place to place and very tenuous worldwide. Small surprises can turn into big ones.

“Whoever is elected gets to call the shots for the next four years, and I don’t think the environment can take four years of Texas-style environmentalism.”

“Let’s stop always taking the short view. That’s just what Tweedledum and Tweedledee want you to do.”

“George the Shrub will undo all the environmental progress we have made in my lifetime, turn education on its head, and turn the Supreme Court over to the radical religious right. These are outcomes so unacceptably evil that a protest vote for Nader looks ridiculous.”

“People are voting for Gore out of fear, not because they think he will make a good president. Sticking to what we believe is the only way to get real change.”

These embattled folks all want to vote for an honest person rather than a packaged image, for someone who is not sold to the highest bidder, for someone who will fight for the people and the environment. Their anger with each other is mainly anger at the choice they face. Vote for Nader and get Bush. Or vote for Gore and get Gore.

But some people refuse to be squeezed into that box.

The great columnist Molly Ivins, for example, says that Nader “has done more real good for this country than both [major] candidates added together and multiplied.” But she’s from Texas and emphatically does not want to do anything that might help Bush become president. “The lesser of two evils does make a difference.”

So for the short term, she says, if your heart is with Nader, be loudly for Nader. If he gets 15 percent in the polls, he’ll be in the presidential debates, with a chance to show up the two Tweedles. When it comes to voting, she says, if you’re in a state with a certain outcome, like Texas that will go for Dubya or Massachusetts that will go for Gore, you can freely vote for Nader, throw a scare into the Tweedle-parties, and help the Greens get recognition and campaign funds. If you’re in a state where the outcome is close, she says, “why don’t we see how it looks in November?”

The irrepressible Michael Moore has another strategy. In an open letter entitled Bush and Gore Make Me Wanna Ralph, he urges all Gore supporters to vote for Gore. “In fact I insist on it, even if you are just throwing your vote away,” he writes. Rather than trying to get these folks to vote for Nader, Moore wants to mobilize the nation’s largest party — the 55 percent who are normally too disgusted to vote.

“What if you drove down to that stinky gym where the little shell game behind the pretend curtains is taking place, walk in, sign in, take the ballot they hand you, and toss yourselves inside the booth like a political Molotov cocktail?” Moore asks. “You wanna tell me there’s a choice here between two guys who both support NAFTA, WTO, the death penalty, the Cuban embargo, increased Pentagon spending, sleazy HMOs, greedy hospital chains, 250 million guns in our homes, more bombing of Iraq, the rich getting richer and the rest of us declaring bankruptcy? Not me. I’m voting for Ralph Nader. KAAAABOOM!”

In 1996 Bill Clinton won with 47 million votes, while 100 million eligible voters stayed home. They could “make history by putting a true American hero at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” without taking a single vote away from Gore.” Moore writes.

For the longer term, why should we put up with an electoral system that gives us nothing but choices between lesser evils? There are far better alternatives. One is the proportional parliamentary system practiced in most democracies. I see people stick up their noses at it, but I never understand why; it allows a fairer hearing to a wider spectrum of views than does our winner-take-all system.

Another intriguing possibility is the instant runoff, practiced in Ireland and Australia. In this system you mark your ballot with your first, second, and third choice. In the first round only first-choice votes are counted. If no one wins a majority, the lowest vote-getter is eliminated. Those whose first choice was the eliminated candidate automatically weigh in with their second choice.

That would take away the agony of voting for someone you despise just to keep someone you despise even more from winning. It would be even better combined with a feature of Russian elections, where there is always a choice called “none of the above.” If a majority of voters choose “none of the above,” all candidates are disqualified. The parties must keep trying until they come up with a slate of possibilities that the people can actually stomach. (Learn more about alternative voting systems from the Center for Voting and Democracy.)

Of course no president from either Tweedle-party would think of leading a charge toward a genuine democracy. You know who would? Here’s a hint: The Green Party already uses instant runoffs for its presidential nominations.

]]>It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Worldhttps://grist.org/article/world/
Mon, 31 Jul 2000 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/world/Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (known familiarly as CJD) is something you do not want to get. Your brain degenerates, piece by piece. First you feel depressed, then you have trouble coordinating. You lose sight, speech, motor control, as the disease travels through the brain. When it reaches the control centers for breathing or heartbeat, you die.

Medical science has no idea how to cure or even slow it.

Don’t get mad.

CJD used to appear mainly in people over 50, progress slowly, and be rare — though it can be misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease, so it may always have been more common than we think. But over the last 10 years in Great Britain, a fast-acting strain, called nvCJD for “new variant CJD,” has been killing people as young as 15. It followed closely upon an outbreak of a disease among cows called BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, otherwise known as mad cow disease). As of last week, nvCJD had killed 79 Europeans.

The link between mad cow disease and human CJD is only beginning to be understood. Both appear to be caused by an agent that isn’t a virus or bacterium or any previously recognized form of life. It seems to be a simple protein called a prion, though proteins are not supposed to be able to reproduce and go around infecting things. And — this is important to keep in mind when we come to the issue of condemned sheep in Vermont — all this science is still uncertain.

One more bit of background. Before the CJD outbreak in England, the disease was well known in only one other place in the world: New Guinea, among tribes that, well, eat each other. There it is called kuru.

Cannibalism seems to be a key factor. The mad cow outbreak may have started with the modern practice of cooking up dead sheep and using them as a cheap protein supplement in cattle feed. Sheep suffer from a brain-degenerating disease called TSE or scrapie. The theory is that somehow a scrapie prion jumped the species barrier and infected a cow. When that cow died, it too was sent to a rendering plant and turned into feed, thus spreading the disease. You need hypothesize just one more species barrier leap to suspect — not prove, just suspect — that beef from mad cows causes nvCJD in humans.

Hence the European beef panic, the incineration of thousands of British cattle, the skittishness of Europeans about their food supply, and a death sentence for about 300 sheep.

Lamb to the slaughter?

The sheep in question are a special high-milk-yielding variety imported from Belgium by three Vermont families who make cheese. The European flock from which they came has never been fed animal-containing feed. Under continuous testing it has shown no sign of scrapie. The sheep brought to Vermont have been quarantined for four years.

Recently four sheep were culled from the herd and sent to the USDA for routine testing. Brain samples were sent to England, where unusual cells were found. “There was evidence that the lesions could have TSE,” says the USDA. The British experts didn’t actually say that. They said things like this: “maybe a proliferation of glial cells, suggesting a neurological condition that might or might not develop later into … disease and might or might not be infectious but that did not resemble any case of BSE or TSE in sheep.”

Upon this non-evidence, the USDA ordered the Vermont flocks destroyed, with monetary compensation to their owners. The owners are fighting for their sheep’s lives. The matter is in court. The sheep police are poised to descend at any moment. Demonstrators gather at the farms.

We obviously have a bureaucracy in overdrive here. I might be more impressed at its zeal, if it were not the same bureaucracy that has for decades blessed the practice of raising meat animals in huge concentration camps and that still allows those animals to be fed with hormones, antibiotics, and dead animals. (The USDA did not take serious steps to ban animal products in feed until 1997; U.S. laws about that are still less strict than European laws.)

Oh deer!

I would be more impressed if the authorities would continue to keep an eye on those Vermont sheep, but expend its executionary energy on farm-raised deer and elk, which seem to be suffering a TSE epidemic in our western states.

I would like to direct some USDA precautionary fervor toward genetically engineered crops and animals, which it tends to pronounce safe at the drop of a biotech company’s campaign contribution.

Speaking of campaign contributions, if you follow the money, you come to an easy explanation of why the USDA is coming down like thunder on three small sheep farms while winking at the gross risks taken every day by the feedlot industry. U.S. cattlegrowers are worried sick that what happened in Britain could happen here — by which they mean not so much the public health risk as the public perception that beef is unsafe. They’re pointing at Vermont sheep to distract attention from their own practices. The USDA is acting not for us, but for them.

]]>Republican Riders in the Saddle Againhttps://grist.org/article/in1/
Mon, 24 Jul 2000 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/in1/I don’t get it. Why are the 24-hour news media, always desperate for gripping stories, reporting every hour on the Camp David summit, though, as I write this column, they have no access to what’s really going on? Why don’t some of those eager reporters move over to Capitol Hill to cover the constantly changing, fully public, ludicrous, horrifying, astounding, comical, fascinating, and, I would argue, far more important Annual Battle of the Environmental Riders?

Which is more important to Americans, anyway — the governance of East Jerusalem or the purity of the air we breathe? Who is more pig-headed — Yasir Arafat, insistent on carving out his own poverty-stricken nation from odd patches of Middle Eastern desert, or Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska), intent on cutting down the Tongass National Forest? A forest, the reporters might point out, of some interest to all of us, because we own it.

Here’s a dramatic story, just one of 50 being enacted within the busy hive of our Congress this week. Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) is working to become the first person ever to be given credit for extinguishing a species. He has authored a small piece of legislation that would allow a drought-stricken New Mexico irrigation project to pump every drop out of the Rio Grande River. That is presently forbidden by the Endangered Species Act, because drying up the river would doom a silvery minnow that lives only there — not to mention every other creature that lives there, endangered or not.

The irrigation district is one of the most inefficient in the West. Its administrators have known they were running into water limits even in non-drought years, but have done nothing to enforce water conservation measures.

Because his relief bill for wasteful irrigators would never get anywhere on its own, Domenici, in time-honored congressional fashion, turned it into a rider. Riders are stuck onto big, necessary funding bills like leeches or ticks or those parasitic lampreys that hang onto sharks. Those who stick them hope that the president, to get the money he needs to run the government, will sign the bill and the public will not notice.

First Domenici pasted his rider to the bill that funds the Department of the Interior. The enviros mounted so much opposition that he removed it and attached it to the Energy and Water spending bill. Next to it sits another rider that would block the Army Corps of Engineers from releasing extra water in the spring from the Gavins Point Dam on the Missouri River in order to help the breeding of endangered fish and birds downstream.

Every summer the major funding bills lumber through the committee rooms and attract these nasty little riders. It’s a daily story with much more import than Elian Gonzalez, but so far it only plays on environmental websites.

Here’s a short excerpt from a Defenders of Wildlife report: “In other action, the Senate defeated on a narrow 50-49 vote a rider by Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) to prevent any more presidential designations of national monuments without congressional approval. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the Senate minority whip, was instrumental in rallying enough votes to persuade Craig Thomas (R-Wyo.) to withdraw his rider designed to block a National Park Service decision to prohibit the use of snowmobiles in most national parks.”

In case you didn’t follow all those double negatives, the Park Service, beset by noise and pollution and complaints from hikers and skiers, is trying to forbid snowmobiles; Thomas is trying to keep that from happening. His rider is not dead; he can reattach it to any bill within reach, even at midnight at the last conference committee when no one is paying attention. If media spotlights would only shine on this skullduggery, we’d find it at least as intriguing as the X-Files.

As of last week, 52 anti-environmental riders were attached to various bills, and the number is rising. The Agriculture funding bill at the moment carries one little zinger (courtesy of Sen. Larry Craig [R-Idaho]) that would stop new regulations on hardrock mining — regulations that would protect groundwater, ensure that mining companies pay for toxic cleanup, and allow the government to refuse mining permits. Another rider authored by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) would take land from Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge and the Cape Hatteras National Seashore for the building of two huge, pointless, destructive jetties.

There are riders to stop the government from spending any money to combat climate change; to reduce the royalties that oil companies pay for extracting oil from public lands; to stop the release of information telling us how bad our city’s air pollution is; to stop the government from designating roadless areas in national forests — and so on. Some of them will get all the way through the president’s signature, some will die. The story has more daily changes than CNN, more suspense than Survivor.

Observant readers will note that all the sponsors of anti-environmental riders I have cited here are Republicans. That’s not because I biased the pick; it’s because this is a Republican game. If we could watch the rider drama on the news, it would not take us long to figure out who the bad guys are.

Maybe one reason we are shown Camp David and Elian and the X-Files and Survivor and campaign ads instead of the actual working of our actual government is precisely so we won’t figure that out.

]]>The Roquefort Fileshttps://grist.org/article/meadows-hamilton-roquefort/
Tue, 18 Jul 2000 03:00:01 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/meadows-hamilton-roquefort/José Bové milks 250 sheep in the Larzac region of France, a rocky, windswept place where you would think no farmer could produce anything. But Bové turns sheep milk into one of the gastronomical treasures of the world, Roquefort cheese. Bové is a leader of the local Roquefort producers association and of the second largest farmers organization in France. So he was well-known locally before he and nine friends drove their tractors to the nearby town of Millau last year and pulled down an under-construction McDonald’s restaurant. Now he is well-known globally.

Sheep up or sheep out.

Bové’s beef with McDonald’s began with America’s beef industry, particularly its habit of dosing feedlot cattle with the kinds of hormones that athletes are tempted to use for the same reason — to bulk up fast. Europeans are disinclined to eat this high-test meat. The European Union forbids hormone-raised beef, either domestically produced or imported. That makes the American beef industry, and the government officials to whom the beef industry pays large campaign donations, very angry.

Now that we have a World Trade Organization, we have an official way to resolve such conflicts. WTO resolutions nearly always come out in favor of trade, no matter what its social or environmental or cultural or health consequences. It was no surprise when the WTO declared the EU ban on hormone-raised beef illegal.

José Bové — he’s cheesed off.

The EU refused to lift the ban. So the WTO imposed the only punishment within its power. It allowed the U.S. to slap retaliatory tarriffs — high taxes imposed at the border — on French products. One of the products thus affected was Roquefort cheese. Which made José Bové and his Roquefort-producing friends very angry.

At a hearing on the actions of Bové and friends on June 30, at least 50,000 people jammed into Millau for a political demonstration equivalent in purpose to Seattle’s anti-WTO bash six months earlier. In the crowd’s estimation, if not the court’s, Bové is a hero. The T-shirt seen all over the streets said on the front, in a direct quote from Bové, “Le Monde n’est pas une marchandise.” (The world is not merchandise, not a product, not for sale.) On the back it said, “Moi non plus.” (Me neither.)

Bové’s supporters are by no means only French. The American media tend to frame stories like this as a confrontation between French and U.S. farmers. But some American farmers actually donated to help with Bové’s legal expenses. The comments of one farmer: “A few of us were standing around our co-op this morning wishing we had some way to help those French guys, and now we have your email we’re glad to send some money so we can have some small part in this.”

Don’t have a cow, man.

The Millau Ten were found guilty — they readily admitted that they pulled down the McDonald’s. They are free until their sentences are announced in September. Because Bové has a prior record of struggles against the French military and against genetically engineered crops, he faces months in prison.

Bové’s home hamlet of Montredon is tiny; maybe six or seven families live there. You would expect its Wednesday evening farmers market to be a small affair. In fact hundreds of people typically show up to shop for vegetables, fruit, preserves, cheese, meat, wine, ceramics, and leather goods. José and a couple of other guys fire up a barbecue where everyone brings meat to grill. They sit around eating and drinking, and then the music starts. There’s a small play. It’s not possible to distinguish producers from consumers; many folks are both. This is a community.

Arch-nemesis.

Somehow, over centuries, people have learned not only to make a living in the sparse Larzac, but to make a rich life. José Bové chose a brilliantly symbolic act to compare the quality of that life with the antiseptic arrogance of McDonald’s. He was protesting more than the injustice of taxing French sheep farmers to force European consumers to accept U.S. mass-produced beef. He was protesting the whole idea that has come to be called globalization.

In a culture dominated by the bare logic of market exchange, everything becomes commodified, including our time, our intelligence, our landscape, our water, our food. José and his neighbors are saying no, that’s not what we want. No, we refuse to be sucked into that system. We insist that our value to one another and the value of our land and lives not be measured in dollars or francs. We insist that the World Trade Organization not be granted the power to force us to eat food from factories. We insist that community, culture, taste, work, and nature are more important than cheap food or free trade. We insist on protecting our traditions from the narrow, heartless economics that would have us fill our lives with things produced wherever they can be made most “efficiently.”

]]>I've Got Good News, and I've Got Bad Newshttps://grist.org/article/got/
Fri, 30 Jun 2000 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/got/In the spirit of celebrating every success, but only to the extent the success deserves, I would like to celebrate something that is kind of hard to describe. The rate at which things are getting worse is slowing down. We’re not going downhill as fast as we once were. The fever is high, but rising more slowly. We’re still headed for the iceberg, but our speed is declining.

The most striking example of this positive-negative phenomenon is world population growth. We humans have more than doubled our numbers since 1950 and will add 77 million more of ourselves this year. The equivalent of France plus Belgium plus Switzerland. The equivalent of the Philippines plus Laos. The equivalent of five Mexico Cities. This one year. China will grow by 12 million persons; India by almost 20 million; Africa by 19 million. The United States will add 1.4 million through natural increase and another 1 million to 3 million through legal and illegal immigration.

Lovable, full of potential as each human may be, no one I know thinks that adding more of us to this crowded planet helps us solve any problems. Many think that population growth makes all problems, from poverty to pollution, impossible to solve.

So here’s what’s worth celebrating. In the mid-1980s, we were growing not by 77 million but by 87 million a year. In the mid-1970s, the average woman bore 3.9 children; now the average is 2.8. The richest populations average only 1.9 children per family, below replacement level. Most industrialized populations have stopped growing or are slowly shrinking.

No one really knows why birth rates are going down, though family planners, economic developers, educators, and feminists are all happy to take credit. Whatever the cause, it’s a trend worth celebrating. Though the population is still growing.

Here’s another slowdown in a bad trend. For the past two years, the amount of carbon dioxide we have spewed into the atmosphere from fossil-fuel burning has gone down. It has been a tiny drop, less than 2 percent. To stabilize the climate we need to cut emissions by 60 to 80 percent. The carbon-dioxide content of the atmosphere is still rising. The earth is still heating up. But at a slower rate.

The causes of the carbon reduction are multiple. The collapse of the Soviet Union is a major one. As its sloppy coal-burning industries shut down or were refurbished, Eastern Europe’s carbon emissions dropped by 30 percent. Western Europe’s emissions, because of carbon taxes and efficiency technologies, have dropped 0.7 percent. The United States is going the wrong direction; its emissions have risen more than 10 percent since 1990. China’s went up over the same period by 28 percent, India’s by 55 percent.

But China’s carbon emissions are not growing anywhere near as fast as its economy. That’s because it is steadily replacing dirty coal with natural gas. Its greenhouse gas emissions and local air pollution are getting worse, but not as rapidly as we might expect. Semi-good news.

Throughout the 20th century, human water use rose twice as fast as the population. The water curve is not rising as quickly as it was, however; in some places it is even turning down. U.S. water withdrawals peaked around 1980 and have since fallen by about 10 percent. Our industrial water use went down 40 percent, partly because of the export of heavy industry to other parts of the world, but also because of water regulations that made efficient use and recycling economically attractive, legally mandated, or both. Irrigation went down partly because of increased efficiency, partly because expanding cities bought water away from farmers (and therefore took land out of food production), and partly because wells went dry. Per capita water use dropped wherever higher water prices cut waste.

Water tables are dropping more slowly than they used to be. That’s some sort of progress.

World fertilizer use has stopped going up, though it is still high enough to cause plenty of air and water pollution. The Soviet collapse helped stop the growth curve, as did European water quality mandates and the rise of organic agriculture. There’s still more fertilizer leaching into wells and lakes than is good for ecosystems or people. But in many places there’s less fertilizer pollution than there used to be, with little or no decrease in crop yields.

The 431 nuclear power plants now operating in the world will probably be a historic peak. From now on at least as many old reactors are due to be decommissioned as new ones are due to come into service. We still have an accumulation of nuclear wastes that we have no idea how to handle. It will continue to grow as long as any reactors are operating, and it will remind hundreds of future generations of our 50-year burst of irresponsible enthusiasm for this technology. But radioactive wastes will be piling up more slowly.

It’s hard to feel celebratory when the rain is slowing but the floodwaters are still rising; or we’re losing altitude but we’re no longer in free fall; or our diet is not taking off extra pounds, but is slowing the rate at which we put on more. Things are still getting worse. But we have turned a corner. It does begin to be possible to believe that we actually could start making things better.

]]>I Have a New Dreamhttps://grist.org/article/a8/
Mon, 26 Jun 2000 20:00:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/a8/It’s so hard to do right in a world that expects you, rewards you, encourages you to do wrong.

As when the Sierra Club, fighting off a Disney mountain development, discovered that it owned shares in Disney.

Ever wonder what happens to all that junk mail?

Photo: Philip Shepherd, NREL/PIX.

As when environmentalists jet to global climate change conferences, emitting greenhouse gases all the way.

As when green groups send out mass mailings pleading for the preservation of forests — mailings printed on proper post-consumer recycled paper, which is, nevertheless, made from ground-up trees, cut from a forest, about to proceed with 20 percent probability to a recycling center, 80 percent to a landfill. One out of a hundred of these appeals will actually generate a response.

The green groups do it because even a 1 percent response keeps them in business. Because they don’t know how else to bring the urgent matter of the shrinking forests to our overwhelmed attention. Because it’s cheap and easy. Because everybody does it.

Consider the plight of the Center for a New American Dream (of which I am a board member). This worthy organization has taken on no less a task than “helping people consume responsibly to improve our quality of life and protect the environment.” It does so without preaching, indeed with an irreverent lightness. “More fun, less stuff” is its motto. The Center gently points out that the relentless effort to channel ever more material through our lives not only devastates the environment, it also clutters our space, makes our days hopelessly hectic, and diverts us from many sources of true (and nonmaterial) satisfaction.

Members are the lifeblood of any organization, especially one that works for voluntary cultural change. So the Center for a New American Dream is on a membership drive. It has been offered a challenge grant: $250,000 to further the work of the organization, if the number of members goes up by 1,500 before next November.

In this world there are experts who will tell you how to enroll 1,500 people in anything. First you buy a mailing list of 150,000 names and addresses. You get it from organizations to which do-good folks of the sort who might be interested in a New American Dream subscribe. Then you send out 150,000 pieces of mail. It’s easy. The system is all set up. Everyone does it.

It will take 150,000 appeals to bring back 1,500 memberships, the experts say. That means 148,500 will be thrown out. Made from trees, printed with inks by fuel-consuming machines, collated, labeled, sorted by other machines, loaded into pollution-spewing trucks, delivered to mailboxes, loaded into other vehicles headed for (20 percent) recycling stations or (80 percent) landfills.

Just the kind of unasked-for, intrusive, life-cluttering, earth-destroying, mindless, soul-eroding, easy, cheap, everybody-does-it consumption that the Center for a New American Dream is asking us to reconsider.

The Center’s staff is well aware of the contradiction. Certain pesky board members have pointed it out as well. But it’s hard to turn away from relative certainty into the unknown. “How else can we get 1,500 new members by November? There’s $250,000 riding on it!”

With a great gulp, the Center decided not to do a mailing, risking the challenge grant rather than blowing off its principles.

It’s enough to make a board member both proud and nervous. People tell me that a national organization cannot survive without regular mass mailings. If one can, it will have to rely on the delightful alternative to the undelightful mass marketing that generates our daily flood of junk mail. The opposite of distant, impersonal manipulation is genuine human friendship.

If each existing Center member brought in two friends, that would get the organization to its goal long before November. Sounds simple. But hardly any organization grows that way, and I’m discovering why. I have pledged to bring in 10 friends myself. I’m halfway there, but I’m finding it hard going, for a disturbing reason.

It is not OK in this culture to talk to friends about causes you believe in, much less to ask them to join in. It’s OK to blast perfect strangers with crass messages every hour of the day, but it’s a tinge embarrassing, it brings up some shyness, it seems an intrusion, it risks rejection to share real heartfelt commitments. It’s easier to share our cynicism with strangers than our dreams with friends.

The very purpose of the Center for a New American Dream seems to require changing that sad fact. I’d love to see the Center — and other good organizations — build up a strong membership while neither buying nor selling mailing lists, while refusing to invade people’s lives with unsolicited appeals, while maintaining such deep respect for trees that it will not waste them. I’d like to see a movement for sane consumption swell up sanely, through webs of friendship among people willing to speak about and act on their real values.